A Desert Called Peace

by Tom Kratman

  "Servant of the Beautiful One, Servant of the Beneficent, Servant of the Most Compassionate . . ." and on through all the ninety-nine names of Allah. These, though, Abdul knew for himself. Indeed, he could have recited the ninety-nine names in his sleep. For all those ninety-nine, it could still have been just a dream.

  But when the mighty voice had thundered out the one-hundredth name? Then Abdul had known that this was not just any dream, but a sending from the Most High.

  The world around the dreaming Abdul was little beyond light and his own prostrate, quivering form. The great voice of Allah seemed to come from everywhere.

  "The believers fear going to this new world, this Donya al Jedidah," rumbled the great voice. "They ask, "Where shall we turn in prayers when al Makkah is not even on the same world? How shall we make the hajj, even once in a lifetime, when the vacuum between the worlds prevents it?" Go you forth unto the believers, Abdul ibn Faisal. Tell them that they are to take a single rock from the Kaaba, in al Makkah. This rock you shall know when you see it for I shall mark it for your eyes alone. And it shall be one of those set by Abraham, stone upon stone, as a shelter for Hagar and her son, Ishmael, the Father of the Arab People.

  "This stone shall be set in silver after it is taken. And you shall take it with you to al Donya al Jedidah where you shall build a new Kaaba. The believers, such as I shall have given the Grace to know they are chosen, shall follow you, some in one ship and others in others. There you shall settle, as Salafiyah, you and those who follow."

  "I am the Maker of Universes. Obey me."

  Trembling still, Abdul awakened from his dream to find himself on his bed, on all fours, and with his head down low. His second wife lay sleeping beside him; so he saw when he looked up.

  It seemed to him that the light by which he saw his wife ebbed very slowly.

  Chapter Twenty

  By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions. It will teach him that certain severities are indispensable in war, that the only true humanity lies in the ruthless application of them.

  —Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege, 1902 Edition

  Hill 1647, Topographical Crest, 0909 hours, 13/2/461 AC

  It was too cold by far for meat to rot. Even so, the air was thick with the stench of phosphorus, napalm, explosives, blood and shit from ruptured intestines. Smoke floated thickly on the breeze. To the north, the steady whop-whop-whop told of the helicopters returning from dropping off the bulk of the Cazador Cohort. Behind, the muted roar of scores of tanks and other armored vehicles droned.

  There were bodies everywhere, enough so that Carrera wanted to puke. He couldn't, of course, not in front of the troops. That would come later. And with it would come, so he strongly suspected, a new set of nightmares to steal his sleep. So be it; so be it. What is necessary is necessary. But if I couldn't compartmentalize, I think I'd go mad.

  "The problem with a massacre . . ." Reprisal, Carrera reminded himself, REPRISAL. "The problem with a reprisal is that it can take just as much out of the men as a battle."

  "Sir?" Soult queried.

  "Look around, Jamey," and Carrera's hand swept over the hill to encompass hundred of listless, weary legionaries, many of them with horrified looks on their faces. "These guys aren't happy about what they've done here, many of them. They'll be useless for at least a day."

  "Then why'd you order it, Boss? I'm not bitching; I'm just curious."

  "Two reasons," Carrera answered. "One is that the boys were pissed and were going to do it anyway, no matter what anyone said. If that had happened, discipline would have been shot permanently. Instead, by giving them the order to do it, discipline is maintained. Thus, on some other occasion where maybe the enemy doesn't deserve this kind of butchery, we'll be able to hold the men in check because they know that if a reprisal had been warranted we would have ordered one."

  "You said two reasons, Boss."

  "Yeah," Carrera answered. "The other reason is that the law requires it. I'll explain later. In the meantime, give me the radio."

  Soult handed the mike over. Carrera made a call to the commander of his mechanized cohort. Brown answered, "Sancho Panzer speaking."

  Carrera pulled the mike away and looked at it quizzically for a moment. When he returned it to his ear and mouth, he said, "Sancho, my armor!"

  "Where you want it, Boss?"

  "The pass between the two fortresses. Legate Jimenez will be taking you, plus Third and Fourth Cohorts, plus the artillery and half the engineers forward. You lead. I'll join you later. Xavier, did you copy that?"

  "Roger, Patricio," Jimenez answered. "Set up a defense or keep pushing?"

  "Relieve the Cazadors, then hold in place. I want to see about bringing up the rest. That, and one other thing."

  "I'll need more trucks," Jimenez observed.

  "You can have the helicopters for one lift. Trucks we are scrounging up."

  "Fair enough. Meet you there. Er . . . what about my prisoners?"

  "Base of the hill. The MP century is coming up to take charge of them."

  "Wilco, then, Patricio."

  Good old Xavier. On him I can rely.

  Carrera handed the microphone back to Soult. "Jamey, get ahold of every one of our units on this hill. Tell them I'll speak to them on this side of the bridge in . . . oh . . . two hours. And tell the sergeant major to bring any of the pressies he's rounded up there at the same time. And I'll need the priest. Oh, and send the PSYOP chief and Fahad the Chaldean up to me. We need to make a little announcement."

  It was actually closer to two and a half hours before everyone and everything needed were assembled.

  Carrera walked out and stood on a little knoll between the bridge and the base of Hill 1647. The officers, centurions and legionaries stood at attention until he called, "At ease. Break ranks. Cluster around." He held up his arms straight to his sides, to show that he wanted the men grouped to where he could speak directly to them all at once. All told, there were nearly seven hundred uniformed men.

  Behind the uniforms, still under armed guard but otherwise unrestrained, were approximately thirty-four members of the press, about seven of them bearing video camcorders. As soon as the legionaries were seated one of the pressies raised a hand and opened his mouth as if to speak.

  "Shut up," Carrera said, pointing directly at the man. "You have no rights here. You have no say here. You ask no questions here until you are allowed to. Shut up and learn."

  Turning his gaze slightly left and then right to take in all the clustered media types, Carrera continued, "Let there be no bullshit among us. You are my enemy and I am yours. Whatever I say you will lie about. Whatever you, in your incarnate ignorance, hear you will not understand and will misreport. If by some strange twist of fate one of you does understand it you will certainly misreport it even more. That is one reason why I have my own camera crew here." Carrera's finger pointed to a small uniformed group with their own video cameras from the PSYOP crew.

  "I intend to speak to the men in Spanish," he told the journalists. "If you can speak Spanish, you can follow along. If you cannot, fuck you, I am not going to bother to translate though a translation of the gist of it will be provided sometime later."

  Switching to Spanish, Carrera continued, addressing his men. "This is a tale of two hills and one law. The hills you see behind me. One of them you just conquered. The other was taken by the Third and Fourth Cohorts in an action every bit as gallant as your own.

  "On your hill you found evidence of a crime committed by the enemy upon our comrades. On the other hill, there was no such evidence. The result is plain to see." Again Carrera pointed, this time at the several hundred Sumeris sitting—either dejectedly or with relief as the mood took them—under guard by the MP century. "There are many prisoners from the unoffending hill; none from the hill and unit responsible for the murder of our men.

  "Some of you are looking very dejected. Whether that is beca
use you lost friends in the assault—and let me assure you here and now that our casualties were very light, certainly in comparison to the magnitude of the task—or because you feel dirty at shooting men who were trying to surrender, or because you are worried about some future criminal action against you, FORGET IT! Your friends are in good hands, you no more committed a crime than an executioner does when he sets the rope around the neck of the condemned. I gave the order to shoot those men." Never mind that you would have done it, anyway, if I hadn't. That isn't important right now. Besides. It's my doing that you're here, my doing the way you've been trained. So if there is fault or blame, they are mine.

  "I know you have all had instruction in the law of war. I directed that that instruction take place. I monitored it. Let me tell you now that that instruction was incomplete. Almost in the nature of things, for it to be complete would have taken weeks, and we did not have extra weeks. So, like every other worthwhile soldier on the planet, you were trained in a truncated version of the law of war, enough to keep you out of trouble. There was more."

  Carrera rather hoped that the men wouldn't begin to nod off once it became apparent he intended to teach a class. He needn't have worried; the men were desperate enough for absolution and benediction that he had their full and complete attention.

  "You learned that there are two bodies of law with regard to the law of war, the statutory law—treaties and such—and the customary law. There is a third which one might call 'the common law' of war. The common law of war is that which, like other bodies of common law around the world, was developed by practical men for practical problems. It was not developed by ignorant shits trying to score points with the equally ignorant 'international community of the very, very sensitive.' The third body of the law of war holds, for example, that men who refuse to surrender and keep on fighting after you have closed to close combat range are to be killed.

  "This sounds harsh, I know. Indeed it sounds illegal since surrender is held in many circles to be an absolute right. It is neither. In the first place, every man who ever went into a close assault with a fixed bayonet has an absolutely pat insanity defense. Thus, you cannot deter him from killing because you cannot, as a practical matter, legally punish him. Some would say that it is unwise to kill an enemy who fights too long, lest he fight to the death and drive up your own casualties. I, and the common law of war, the practical law of war, answer that without exacting a price for continued resistance, you invite the enemy to drive up your casualties by fighting almost to the death."

  Carrera's face changed to contemplative, even musing, for a moment. "That's just an example, by the way. Yet as a fine general on Old Earth, George S. Patton, once observed, the enemy loses his right to surrender if he hasn't done so by the time you close to three hundred meters. Again, by the common law of war and as a practical matter, it just works that way and it is never punished. And, frankly, an enemy who indicates a willingness to fight beyond the point that wisdom should tell him to stop if he wants to live has already indicated he does not want to live all that much and is simply too dangerous and unpredictable to take a chance on."

  The face grew hard and cold again. "That's not what we're talking about though, taking the enemy's life because of a potential immediate or fairly short term threat to your own. Those Sumeris up there really did want to surrender. Why did I tell you not to let them?"

  Carrera looked around, slowly and deliberately, trying to catch as many eyes as he could in a single glance. "As you probably know, there is, over on the continent of Taurus, a fairly new court, the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court, or CCC. This court purports to have universal jurisdiction over certain crimes, much as any nation's courts have jurisdiction over piracy at sea. Without going into the merits of this 'universal jurisdiction' here, let me ask you what the CCC could have done to you, or to the Sumeris, that was one whit worse than what was done here today? The answer, as I am sure you are all aware, is precisely nothing. Courts are for civilized circumstances where people can be deterred by punishment. There is nothing any court can do to anyone, and even what it could do it cannot do very quickly, that even begins to approach what we do to each other in war, routinely. The CCC, or any similar court, is toothless as far as furthering its stated purpose. It might be effective, mind you, at its true purpose which is undermining national sovereignty and the ability of the civilized world to defend itself from barbarism. That, however, is the subject for another day.

  "What is important for this day is that the law of war—customary, statutory, or common—cannot be enforced by any court, ever. Because we live in an anarchic system of sovereign states, and because the stakes in war are so high, the only thing that can enforce the law of war is the law of war itself. To do this it has one recourse: reprisal. Reprisal, which I am sure you are familiar with because Tribune Puente-Pequeño, your law of war instructor, told you about it— I've heard him, is a war crime, or conduct that would ordinarily be a war crime, but which becomes legal and legitimate in order to counter or deter an enemy from violating the law of war. It is all we have, all the world has, to make the law of war work.

  "Thus, I ordered you to reprise for the murder of our men. Thus," and here Carrera stopped for a moment and pointed skyward where three Turbo-Finch Avengers were winging it northward, "I have ordered leaflets prepared, in Arabic, to be dropped ahead of our forces, to let the enemy know what we have done and to explain to him the laws which he must follow in the future if he wishes to avoid a repetition. Thus," and his finger pointed at the pressies, still standing in clueless (which Carrera was certain was their natural state) shock (at being treated with open contempt), "I had those . . . people brought here so that they, too, can spread the word. Let everyone know that if you commit a crime against the Legio del Cid then punishment will be immediate and frightful.

  "It may seem unfair to some of you, even horrifying, that we took no account of the innocence or guilt of particular individuals on that hill. The law of war assumes that there is collective responsibility. We know this for two reasons. One is that, in order to be considered a legitimate combatant, and to be entitled to all the protections due a prisoner of war, one must meet four criteria: carrying arms openly, being identifiable as a combatant, being under a chain of command— and in an organization—responsible for your actions, and being in an organization that itself follows the law of war."

  Carrera was fudging a bit there. The law did not require "being in an organization," exactly. It required that one operate in accordance with the law of war. Since individuals did not conduct operations, however, and organizations did, his was a logical and reasonable interpretation.

  "Thus, if your organization does not follow the laws of war, even if you do, you become an illegal combatant and lose your protected status as a prisoner of war, if captured.

  "The other way we know that the law of war assumes collective responsibility is in the doctrine of reprisal itself. Say, for example, that the enemy is violating the law of war by using a hospital as an ammunition storage point. We can bomb the shit out of the hospital, or even another hospital, butchering the wounded. We can do this even though the wounded committed no crime. They may still be held accountable, in practice, for the actions of their side.

  "Let me conclude, then, by commenting on the nature of the particular form of reprisal we took, to wit: denial of quarter and refusal to take prisoners. These were crimes. Once again, every reprisal is a crime. They become nonculpable, legal, when engaged in to enforce the laws of war. This is what we did, nothing more. We did what was necessary to support the law of war. We are guiltless."

  Carrera turned to the Chaldean priest. "Father Hanna, if you would give the men a general benediction and absolution . . ."

  Hamilton, FD, 0612 hours, 15/2/461 AC

  "I did warn you, Mr. Secretary, that Patrick could be hard to control."

  Newspapers littered the desk, each with a screaming headline of "War Crime." The secretary of war's elbows rested
on the papers, heavily. Campos adjusted the hands he had cupped around his face just enough to glare at Virgil Rivers with one eye. He did not like being reminded.

  "Be that as it may, Virgil," Campos answered, "who would have expected this shitstorm?"

  Well, Rivers thought, frankly, I did. I'd have been surprised, as a matter of fact, if Hennessey hadn't done something, at least, to create one. It's one of his two or three natural talents. Wisely, Rivers kept the thought to himself.

  Instead he offered, "I've had the JAG here look over the statement Hennessey issued. They say that it's legally true, if unpleasant, except for one small detail."

  "And that would be?" Campos asked, still glaring with one eye.

  "There are actually seven requirements to making a legitimate reprisal. Hennessey snuck in an eighth. His statement said that a proper reprisal must be 'not merely proportional but also sufficient to deter future violations of the law of war.' The JAG says that is not part of the law, though it is logically and therefore legally defensible."

  "But he's just a fucking . . . what was that rank he used? Legate? What's that mean? Colonel? Lieutenant Colonel? Lieutenant?"

  "Umm . . . no, Mr. Secretary. There is, in the fine print of the contract between us, a little section that says that Legio del Cid ranks will be treated as, and have the power and authorities of, their traditional titles. The actual meaning of "legate" is not lieutenant or lieutenant colonel, but lieutenant general. Therefore, even by our rules, he has all the authority he needs."

  "Sneaky bastard," Campos said, without heat.

  "Yes, sir. He is a sneaky bastard." Oh, to hell with it. "I warned you."

  "So what do we do?"

  Rivers took a moment before answering. He walked to the window and looked out at the broad, slow-moving river that separated the War Department headquarters from the rest of the Federal District and simply stared at it for some minutes, thinking.