A Desert Called Peace

by Tom Kratman

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 o
ne 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 properl
y, 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.