by John F. Carr
The Adamant was in an orbit that herringboned most of the habitable Highlands. After coordinating with the ground parties of Gurkhas that Falkenberg sent out, the cruiser parachuted fuel dumps to the spots where men waited to guard them.
Although the Falkenberg was not one for explaining, Jeremy Savage had long since guessed the purpose of the dune buggies stacked in the cruiser’s cargo hold. Once they had been fitted out with machine guns, grenade launchers and bazookas, these driver-and-shotgun-rider units would surpass the mobility of a Cossack and could drive the Bedouin as well as the Mahdi’s outriders well away from Eureka. Sooner or later there would have to be another confrontation—another wholesale bloodletting. But this time it would be in the Mahdi’s camp and not around the walls of Eureka.
Savage’s ruminations were broken off by another explosion. This was unusual. Falkenberg had acquiesced to the town fathers’ plea that the homes of their cooks and gardeners not be destroyed and as a consequence the Mahdi’s guerrillas still managed to hold out across the river and pour the occasional barrage into Eureka. But attacks uphill on Fort Camerone were a rarity.
Outside in the bailey of the fort a hole in the pisé de terre parade ground looked, to Savage, like the work of an armor-piercing round from a recoilless rifle. He glanced up at the whirling radar antennas and while he was wondering what was delaying the trajectory tracker a gun fired from within the fort. Savage climbed the wall to look and as he had expected, the smoke of the retaliatory round was rising from the middle of Medina.
Colonel Falkenberg appeared beside him on the ramparts.
“Going to give them anymore?” Savage asked.
The Colonel shook his head and went back into his office.
Next morning Major Myers led a column of bulldozer tanks upstream to the shallows where the Mahdi’s first offensive had faltered. Then they forded to the Gobi side and made their way back downstream to Medina. By lunchtime Medina was flat.
Major Savage waited but the town council did not complain. Perhaps, he decided, they had by now taken a few rounds into their own homes and families. Lester Shirreffs in his capacity of Company rep called later in the day but his objection was largely pro forma.
Private Chand’s family had served the Raj for seven generations, therefore it was not astonishing that his first name was Johnny. Recruit Rupp Dorsang did not have so distinguished a family history but he had learned to drive down in the hot flatlands of Pakistan, then polished his skills on the narrow and heart-stopping roads that thread the edges of the mountain gorges of Nepal. Like most drivers from that part of Earth, he was his own mechanic and saw nothing special about fabricating new engine parts out of castoff horse shoes. Private Chand could do the same for the worn or missing pieces of any weapon, ranging from kukhri knife to machine gun.
This time though, their conveyance was new. Modeled on the low-tech but utterly dependable air-cooled beetle, the dune buggy was light enough in the front end to make 4-wheel drive and power steering unnecessary. Tractor-sized rear tires were puncture-sealed and would withstand anything less than a direct hit by an 88. Outrigger wheels were also bulletproof. The latter were necessary to keep the high mounted gun turret which stood behind the driver and atop the engine from capsizing during a tight turn or when traversing a hillside.
The outriggers could be raised to get through narrow places. Larger than the radiator on many cars, the oil cooler was encased in bullet-deflecting baffles and was adequate for Haven’s treacherous climate. Encased inside the oil cooler housing was also a complex centrifugal air cleaner to cope with dust storms. The flexible fuel bag encased in a wire cage gave the vehicle a range of nearly 2,000 kilometers at speeds up to a hundred-thirty klicks. A system of vacuums and check valves ensured that crank-case oil never dropped below a livable level.
Oil cooler and air cleaner were armored. Nothing else, including driver or gunner, could afford the extra weight. The fuel bag was protected from flying gravel by ammunition cases that surrounded it, ensuring a quick end and little of value for an enemy to salvage. Forward over the driver’s legs was storage for kit, water and food.
Johnny flexed his legs and squeezed his buttocks together on the tiny jump seat that folded down inside the open gun turret. Recruit Dorsang was making good time over the dibdida, which is the Arab term for flat flint desert with a gravel cover. There had been a light snow fall the previous night and tires hummed and a constant spray of gravel and ice was rattling off the rudimentary fenders. Rupp Dorsang had such a clear view and was making so much speed that he was not even bothering with the broken-field driving that made them less of a target.
Standing a full meter higher than his sitting driver, Johnny had an even better view. He tongued the chinstrap extension of his helmet and miniaturized binoculars swung into place. Up ahead the flat would narrow and they would have to slow down to play it safe.
Rupp Dorsang gripped the wheel and shifted down as the wadi narrowed and the dibdida gradually gave way to dikaka, which is sandy washboard plains with tough, axle-twisting shrubs. Haven’s steppe plants enforce personal space more rigidly than any human culture by the simple expedient of extending their roots in all directions and leaving no water to encourage any intruder. Recruit Dorsang drove at a more or less steady fifty klicks, spinning and wheeling in odd, waltz-like movements to give each shrub a wide berth, since it was much easier to conceal signs of digging and mine-planting in the clump of wire weed.
According to the strip map that displayed among his instruments they were almost there. The dune buggy topped a slight rise and ahead the dikaka yielded to a huge sabkha. The salt flat’s incrustation was of such pristine whiteness that it appeared to be freshly fallen snow. He tongued-down shades against the glare and squinted. The sabkha was virgin, with not the faintest trace of even a camel’s hoofprint. If the drop went off on schedule their fuel dump would come down in the middle of the depression.
“Ready?” he asked as he slowed down.
“Ready,” Johnny Chanel replied from the gun turret, and loaded a canister into the catapult. When the dune buggy shifted down another gear he fired it rearward. By the time they were out on the salt pan boiling the tea billy in the shade of a ground cloth the canister was glowing and emitting enough IR to deflect any heat-seeker to it instead of the still-hot dune buggy. It would continue burning for several hours—until the dune buggy engine had cooled down to ambient and the tea billy was a tepid memory.
Rupp Dorsang’s alarm jangled him awake and he reached automatically for his weapon, then saw Johnny Chand sitting calmly alert, his head swiveling about the horizon. “Is it time?” Chand asked.
The double sonic boom of an entering shuttle affirmed Dorsang’s alarm. They looked in the opposite direction of the boom and caught a faint twinkle of day-glow green in the mid-afternoon sun. “Be night before it lands,” Chand said.
They had both witnessed drops during the African campaign but never from an orbiting ship. There was no wind at all on the ground but this, they knew, was not necessarily true of the upper atmosphere. Sometimes in Africa a stratum of wind would take over and no amount of remote control steering from the ground could induce it to go into the drop zone instead of away into enemy hands. Johnny Chand got into the turret and lined up the machine gun sights on the parachute. Fifteen minutes later the chute was appreciably below where the gun sights pointed, but it was directly below, which meant no wind so far. The only trouble was, the chute was still more than twenty klicks above ground.
They waited another twenty minutes until the descending day-glow green chute was fairly visible to the naked eye. Then Rupp Dorsang started the dune buggy and they began a leisurely zigzag circuit of the landing zone. On the northern side, after a three-quarter counterclockwise circuit, Johnny tapped the top of Rupp’s helmet and pointed. There was nothing visible but the IR detectors were sensing heat in that direction.
Moving carefully, they climbed a slight rise until, standing tiptoe in the turret Jo
hnny could see the dust cloud of a pack of hurrying camels. After a few minutes study they concluded that it was not a raiding party. This was a fairly large Bedouin clan on the move, driving their scrawny thirsty sheep before them in search of water and pasture.
But seeing manna descending from heaven, the Bedouin were now hastening toward the spot where the day-glow green chuteful of all things good would land. There were thirty men armed with everything from muzzle-loading heirloom jezails to automatic rifles, looted from corpses of the Seventy-seventh. Well behind the hastening cameleers their women and children and elders trudged along on foot.
“We must get their arms too,” Chanel said.
Rupp Dorsang nodded. “Ready?”
Among other bits of ‘unnecessary’ equipment, the dune buggy had a larger than normal muffler. Since thirty-percent of an air-cooled engine’s noise is transmitted directly through the walls of the engine itself, this muffler did not make it silent but it cut down on the noise so that shouting, hurrying men and complaining camels were unaware of the two-man charge until Dorsang flipped the switch that started a siren engineered to emulate the shriek of an afreet. While the tribesmen were still goggling about in astonished horror Chand opened up with the twin 7.62s.
It was not battle; it was slaughter. On the first pass the dune buggy’s two occupants took out half the would-be hijackers and created chaos in their sheep.
Camels pranced and shied, making aim impossible. Their riders slid off on the far side, away from the murderous hail of Gurkha bullets and fought to bend and bind the screaming beasts’ forelegs, which is the Arab substitute for a hobble and helps to make a camel lie still and perform his god-designated role as a bullet shield.
Rupp Dorsang tore past and on beyond range before he made a leisurely U-turn and began zigzagging back in again. This time he passed to their rear, forcing the Bedouin to shorten their line and regroup into a circle. In the confusion Johnny got a few more and heard the crack as bullets passed uncomfortably close to him. He wondered if it was really true that Nemourlon body armor would restrict his movements too much.
Several camels broke their bent-knee hobbles loose in their final agony and lashed about causing as much damage to their owners as Johnny was doing. Spinning rapidly in the turret to keep fire concentrated on their diminishing square, he was still spraying dumdums and tracers as the dune buggy wheeled and waltzed out of range.
Rather than risk two U-turns in a row, Rupp popped the clutch in reverse and was charging back toward the men who shrunk behind downed camels for a third time. This time he secured the twin 7.62s and launched a half dozen grenades, five of which landed inside the circle. When Rupp heard the Crump of the launcher he popped the clutch in reverse, spun, and zigging and zagging, they topped a slight ridge and ran a hundred meters out of sight, then approached cautiously from an unexpected angle. Johnny stood on the jump seat in the turret and tongued his binoculars down.
From behind a hillock they studied the situation. The dependents had heard the racket and interpreted it correctly. They were doing their best to dig in at a distance. Half of the raiders’ camels were dead, and a fair portion of the other half were wounded and trotting about maddened with pain and making the most dreadful noises. It was hard to tell if anyone was still alive behind the still-kneeling camels. Then one by one, the living barricade got their feet with the clumsy knees-first, back legs all-the-way, and up to navigational altitude by straightening their front legs. Behind them seven men formed a tight, back-to-back circle.
“Ready?” Rupp asked.
“Whenever you are.”
Rupp gunned the motor and was into third gear before breaking clear of the ridge. Chanel poured twin 7.62 fire over his driver’s head, swinging to the side and struggling to stay on target as Rupp zigged and zagged, spewing great showers of sand and gravel as outriggers dug in. The dune buggy circled the beleaguered men twice at twenty paces, pouring fire in all the while, and then was zigzagging off again.
“Anybody left?” Rupp asked.
“Maybe two. Let them live.”
“Sure thing,” the driver agreed. “By the time they’re through improving the story we’ll be a full battalion.”
But as they watched one bloody survivor moved. Pushing and prying with his ancient rifle, he extricated himself from the mound of bleeding flesh, struggled to his feet and looked wildly around.
When he saw nobody else alive apart from the man who had fallen on top of him he reversed his jezail and used the butt to bash in the other man’s skull. While Johnny and Rupp stared at each other in bewilderment the now sole survivor snatched a length of white turban cloth and began waving it. When the Gurkhas did not shoot him immediately, the man clasped his hands behind his neck and began trotting toward them.
“You guys speak English?” he called when he was within hailing distance.
Rupp gave a solemn nod.
“Jesus H. Christ, am I ever glad to make your acquaintance!”
“I have never made Mr. Christ’s acquaintance,” Johnny Chand said, “But the English speak highly of him. How may we help you?”
“Get me to your commanding officer.”
“You have intelligence?”
“Ph.D., University of Beirut.”
This was not exactly the kind of intelligence Johnny meant.
“We cannot take you immediately,” he said. “But you may stay with us until relief comes. We will not kill you.”
“Thank God I’m finally away from those fucking fanatics!” the young man said. “I went off to Earth—American University in Beirut, and when I come home my house is gone, my parents have disappeared, and the first guy to feed me a square meal goes and ships me off to the fucking Mahdi army.”
He tore off a turban and wiped his forehead before stamping on the cloth. “Once you get on Earth nobody’ll give you any straight news about what’s happening out here. And a dozen years ago here nobody’d even heard of the Mahdi. Hey, what is that big thing coming down?”
“Our assignment,” Rupp said. “Help us get it set up and no Arab can get close once it’s finished.”
And thus Hassan el-Beqr, whom they promptly rechristened Hassan the Assassin joined the Forty-second. He was a sunny, good-natured boy in spite of his recent mishaps and spent a week with Rup and Johnny stringing concertina wire around the perimeter of the fuel dump before a tank patrol on the way home to the fort stopped to take on fuel and ended up taking Hassan back to the Forty-second.
Since this was the first of many planned drops, the operation had been followed with great interest by Colonel Falkenberg and others at the fort. Private Chand’s report squared with satellite observations and all hands concluded that the Bedouin band had just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place.
In the week before a patrol took Hassan back to the fort, Rupp and Johnny learned more than they really needed to know about the boy’s growing up on the second floor above his Christian parents’ mom-and-pop grocery store in Eureka, of his high hopes for adventure, and the cloistered reality of his years in reconstructed Beirut’s American University where it was unsafe for an outsider to walk the streets.
Hassan had always thought of himself as Lebanese and Beirut had been a rude awakening to the feuds and factionalism of that unhappy land. Doubly so because of CoDominium propaganda to the effect that past wounds were healed and that IRA provos no longer trained in back country camps beyond Baalbek.
When he heard stories about Troubles back home on Haven, Hassan equated them with the same lies he had been told about Earth and thus had landed totally unprepared in the middle of a holy war. When a stranger befriended him, Hassan had not asked questions. By the time he was handed a rifle it was too late for questions.
THIRTEEN
IN SPITE OF the Mahdi’s initial defeat, Colonel Falkenberg’s scorched earth policy was finally backfiring. With nowhere else to go the uncommitted had been forced into the fanatic’s camp. The two-man Gurkha dune-buggy patrols held the
area for five hundred klicks in every direction from Eureka, but Medina’s razing had not, it turned out, been sufficient. The hard dry soil lent itself to tunneling and the jihadists’ home base was unscathed. Hardly a night went by without another foray against the town across the river. These raids did little damage but their propaganda value drew thousands more to the Mahdi’s cause.
Falkenberg was as ready as he would ever be but he wanted to fight the battle on the Mahdi’s ground, far enough away for Eureka to have a second chance should anything go wrong.
He was working the details when the Comm Sergeant entered the duty room. “Colonel, sir. We’ve got the CD Governor DeSilva on the line.”
Falkenberg turned to Major Savage. “I was hoping we could finish up this Mahdi mess before reporting in to the Governor. Sergeant, transfer the call.”
The voice coming out of the headset was crackling with static. “Colonel Falkenberg, this is Governor DeSilva. I’ve been wanting an update on the Islamic Revolt but, due to an electro-magnetic storm on Cat’s Eye, transmissions to the Highlands have been impossible. If Haven were a civilized world it would have a series of relay satellites and we could communicate by laser. No budget for it, despite how much ore the Companies rip out of her surface.”
“Understood, Governor, the atmospheric disturbances have made our situation here in the Highlands much more difficult. At the moment, the Mahdi is preparing for another mass attack on Eureka. We’ve defeated him twice now, but like the Hydra he keeps growing new heads—”
The transmission was lost for a few seconds in a big burst of static.
“…a few days ago one of our ham radio operators picked up a distress call from a General Parker. Have you heard from him?”
“No, we lost contact with him when he ventured out of Fort Camerone to lead an expedition against the rebel forces. Haven’t seen him since he left the fort.”
