by Tom Kratman
* * *
It was commonly believed that Samsonov's boys had recruited one group of Pashtun for Carrera. At one level, this was true: there was a central department for the Pashtun Scouts (numbers of whom were not actually Pashtun). At another level, though, it was false. There were several more or less independent groups. One of these groups was composed of four hundred and eighty-seven honest-to-Allah horse cavalry, supplemented by a small group of twenty legionaries detached from various cohorts and tercios to direct and maintain communications with Legionary headquarters.
These now splashed on horseback across the Jayhun River which separated the city of Thermopolis from Pashtia proper. The river was low, this late in the season, but still as icy cold as if it were full of the annual snowmelt.
The cavalry carried rifles and machine guns, of course, and even had a section of light mortars. Still, there's nothing like cold steel between real men and every Pashtun on horseback also carried a lance and a sword. Tradition; that was the thing.
A very small detachment had crossed early, three days prior, at a ford nowhere near as good as this one. They'd crossed, ridden deep and then circled around. The mujahadin guards watching the ford had seen nothing amiss in twenty-one riders, looking for all the world like their comrades, coming up from behind. And then, from the distance of twenty yards, the lances waved in greeting had lowered. Spurring their horses, the scouts had charged, spearing the guerillas like so many boar.
Those same forward scouts now stood in their stirrups, wearing genial smiles and waving their comrades forward with the heads of their erstwhile enemies.
From the mass of horsemen winding their way through the flood, two emerged and, forcing their way up the riverbank, rode to join the Scouts as they waved their lances and severed heads. Of these, one—Rachman Salwan—was another Pashtun, though he had some odd, non-Pashtun words in his vocabulary. The other was one of the legionary officers, Tribune II David Cano of the Fourth Tercio, on detached duty to the Scouts for the campaign.
Cano had been hand-selected for the job—along with nineteen others, officers, centurions, and noncoms—by Carrera, Samsonov, and a Pashtun, Subadar Masood, recommended by Samsonov and flown specially to the island. Following selection, the twenty had been given a crash course in Pashtun by some of the Volgans who still had pretty fair fluency in the language and a few Pashtun flown in for the exercise. Still, at best, so Cano thought, he spoke a pidgin.
Despite the lack of real fluency, Cano had taken so well to the Scouts, joining them at their meals, discussing their lives and their problems, playing some of their tribal games, that Rachman Salwan had taken a liking to him and taken him under wing. Being senior in the tribe among the young horsemen who'd signed on with Samsonov's recruiter, Rachman served—unofficially, the cavalry scouts didn't have a very formal chain of command outside of the legionaries placed over them—as the senior noncom for the squadron.
"Praise them, Sahib," Rachman advised in a whisper, "but not too much. Tell them, 'Aafaran!'"—bravo—"Tell them they were 'dzhangyaalay'"—courageous—"But do not promise them any reward yet. The heads and the honor are enough for good Pashtun serving in the field."
Cano appreciated the advice; Rachman was more a friend or even a brother than a subordinate. He stood by his stirrups, waving a rifle and shouting to his men—yes, my men—of their valor and their skill.
14/9/467 AC, The Base, Kashmir
Nur al-Deen scratched his head with puzzlement while Mustafa tapped his fingers with irritation. Both men watched underlings mark the large map of Pashtia that hung on one rocky wall deep in their underground complex near the Pashtian border. Each mark represented a group of mujahadin with which he had lost contact or with which his headquarters still had communications. There were many more of the former than of the latter. The rest? Were they dead? Hiding? Engaged? He didn't, couldn't, know.
"You know," he muttered, "I am really beginning to hate this group of infidels."
After tugging absentmindedly at his beard for a few minutes, and playing with his worry beads for a few more, Mustafa stood and returned to his quarters. Once there, he closed the door behind him, went to a small casket and removed from it the device given him by High Admiral Robinson for direct communication.
"Robinson here, Mustafa. I see the problem."
"Seeing does me little good," Mustafa snarled. "What is it? What can you do about it?"
"They're using EMP—electro-magnetic pulse—bombs, frying the internal workings of your phones and radios," the High Admiral answered. "I can't do anything about it. We have none aboard the fleet and the only things I do have that can generate electro-magnetic pulse are nuclear weapons. As we've discussed, I can't use those. Given time and warning, which I didn't have"—time to have a little chat with Intelligence, I think—"we could have hardened your radios and phones against them. Even now I can send you some simple methods to protect what you have in the north of the country. But the southern part? No, too late. We could manufacture some EMP bombs ourselves and slip them to you, but not in time to do you any good. I can advise you of enemy movements from up here but . . . "
"But I have no way to get the information to my fighters on the ground," Mustafa finished. "They'll have to escape on their own."
"I fear that few of them will, Mustafa. The enemy has blocked all the major passes and most, I think, of the minor ones."
"Then we are helpless."
14/9/467 AC, Cruz Apartment, Ciudad Balboa
Cara sighed, helplessly. Ricardo had his eyes on the television screen, a bottle of rum in one hand, a glass of some local cola in the other. Nothing she'd been able to do had pulled his attention from either rum or television since the Legion had commenced operations in Pashtia. Sometimes, she thought she saw him rub at his eyes. Tears? She didn't know and really didn't want to find out.
God, what have I done to him? she wondered. He doesn't eat. He isn't studying. He won't pay any attention to me or the children. I thought he would learn to be happy . . . happier, here with us. Why aren't we enough for him?
Was I just selfish, demanding he get out of the Legion? I don't know. I do know that if he'd stayed in he'd probably be over there now and it would be me watching the television for any sign of him and worrying myself sick. So what did I do? I substituted his misery for mine. Maybe that wasn't fair.
But he's my man, not the Legion's. I own him. My rights are superior to theirs.
Again she sighed. But are they superior to his?
15/9/467 AC, Sanda, Pashtia
The town ahead wasn't much, perhaps two hundred houses, a mosque and a few stores. Even so, it promised resupply and some refuge from the eyes in the sky.
The plane, blotted out by the sun, wasn't even a dot to Noorzad when it began its dive. His first warning was when a horse screamed—always more horrible than the scream of a man—as large-caliber bullets pierced its torso, flinging it in blood to the ground.
The column, which had been trudging wearily to the mountains to the north, and safety, suddenly erupted in bedlam. Men shouted; animals squealed. Then came the sound of the enemy's machine guns—a brrrrp of explosions so close together they sounded like cloth ripping—and the whine of its engines as it pulled up and around for another pass.
Soon, much sooner than could be accounted for by a single plane, a salvo of rockets erupted overhead in the glare of the sun. Flechettes, they had to have been, as pockets of men, horses, mules and donkey's were scythed down along the line of march. Some of the horses were felled with as many as a dozen of the finned nails entering their bodies and then tumbling to slice out inch-wide routes through their flesh. Men, small targets as they were, might take half as many. To the targets it made little difference.
Many of the riflemen and machine gunners returned fire as Noorzad had trained them to. Unfortunately, he had trained them to engage helicopters and relatively high performance jets. These new infidel planes made a hash of their training as they fired and t
urned without ever entering the curtain of fire thrown up by those on the ground.
Should I have stayed and fought where I was? Noorzad wondered amidst the confusion. He shook his head. No, that would have just gotten my entire group isolated, surrounded, and destroyed. It is more important to preserve a seed, a kernel, from which more mujahadin can grow.
Noorzad lifted his eyes heavenward and saw both of the enemy aircraft twisting in the sky. He thought, but could not be sure, that they had their canopies pointing downward. The aircraft separated, one moving to the north of Noorzad's band the other to the east. He thought the one that flew to the north was further out than the eastern one.
This, too, was different from what he was used to. Normally he'd have expected the aircraft to make a pass or two, drop some bombs, fire some rockets, and then move on. To have the infernal machines . . . linger . . . well, that was disturbing.
As he'd thought, the eastern plane was closer. It came in, low and menacing. It fired its machine guns in bursts, veering slightly southward with each ripped cloth roar.
"Cut the lead! Cut the lead!" Noorzad tried to shout over the din. No matter; his men, such as were firing, were too intent on their hoped-for target, or seeking cover from its guns, to listen.
In the confusion, Noorzad lost track for a moment of the plane that had gone to the north. Suddenly remembering, he turned his eyes in that direction and saw that that enemy bird, too, was diving in. He saw a glint of dull light; from the undercarriage, so he thought.
The thought brought absolute terror. Noorzad had seen silvery canisters under aircraft before.
"Naaapppaaalllmmm!"
Some of his followers heard his shout, saw the aircraft bearing in, and followed Noorzad in running out of its line of flight. Even the heavy bullets of the other plane held small terror in comparison to being burned alive. Still, many did not hear or, if hearing, did not understand. These kept their positions and either hid or fired as the mood and their degree of manhood took them.
Noorzad looked behind himself as he ran. He'd guessed right, he saw, and took no satisfaction in it. From underneath the second aircraft, the one from the north, two cylinders tumbled end over end until reaching the ground. There they broke apart, spilling their incendiary contents along two parallel straight lines with almost no dispersion. The burning stuff moved like a mini-tsunami, passing around the boulders and covering such of his men who'd remained behind in fire. Their common howl of utter agony sounded even over the roar of flame, engine and machine gun.
We've got to split up, Noorzad thought, breathlessly. Together we're simply too inviting a target.
Noorzad took a hiding position between two boulders and pulled out his map. Yes, there were enough small towns like Sanda that he could hope to hide the bulk of his force while he escaped with the small, hard core that had been with him for years.
16/9/467 AC, Mazari Omar, Pashtia
Press conferences with the Legion were rare, very rare.
Still not rare enough to suit me, thought Carrera. Even so, I suppose I owe it to the legionaries left behind, and the families of those who are here, to let them know what's happening.
The limited number of pressies, deliberately limited, actually, was clustered around Carrera in a town square in front of a mosque that was little more than rubble.
The whole town was considerably the worse for wear, Carrera saw. With the awful task of blocking escapes, driving the enemy from a roughly triangular area two hundred miles wide and one hundred and fifty deep, and searching out the thousands of little towns and villages, and likely cave complexes, his forty-eight maniples of infantry, fifteen of Cazadors, and dozen of mechanized troops were, to say the least, stretched.
Still, the town had blocked the only possible supply route from Thermopolis and so the problem of the town had had to be solved. He'd solved it by flattening the town in substantial part. Not for him the risking of his own troops to limit collateral damage and loss of civilian life. He didn't have enough troops for that and the collateral damage meant almost nothing to him.
"They know we're coming," he'd said. "It's up to them to get out of our way, not up to us to tiptoe around them."
Not that he'd blasted the town indiscriminately, far from it. Rather, with his one hundred and eight long-range, Volgan-designed and built 152mm howitzers, his thirty-six Tsunami multiple rocket-launchers, hundreds of sorties by Turbo-Finches and Nabakovs in the bomber role, and, over the last twenty-four hours, his thirty-six heavy mortars, he'd pounded every known and likely enemy hiding position with considerable precision, aided by real time reconnaissance from both his own air assets and the FSC's.
Since the enemy insisted on trying to hide among civilians, however, his precision had meant more civilian casualties rather than fewer.
"Tough shit," he said to a reporter who asked about civilian casualties. "If they want to save civilians, let them not hide behind the women's skirts. I'm certainly not going to pander to their deliberate violations of the laws of war."
One might have thought that the global press would have intervened and interfered. They said not a word. They'd learned, over the years, the Legion had no compunction about killing members of the media they considered to be in the enemy camp. There was not, in fact, a member of the FSC's or Tauran Union's press within thirty miles of Mazari Omar. And of the members of, say, the Islamic world's press, particularly al Iskandaria . . .
"That's them over there, gentlemen," Carrera told the remaining assembled members of the Fourth Estate, all carefully vetted members of the Balboan and other Northern Colombian media. "Yes, those dozen swinging from the lampposts. We caught them with enemy propaganda in their video recorders. They were then duly turned over to our Pashtian allies who tried them and hanged them as enemy combatants found not wearing uniforms. The chief mullah for my Pashtun, Mullah Hassim, approved the sentences completely."
* * *
Not all the buildings of Mazari Omar had been damaged. Most were, in fact, still standing and even in reasonable repair. Of these, many were requisitioned by the Legion. In the case of public buildings there would be no recompense, though the few owners of private real estate that the Legion needed were compensated with cash on the spot.
In one such, an apartment building of three floors that had the distinct advantage of having a very open ground floor, the MI, or military intelligence, maniple had set up shop.
Larry Triste was not in command of the MI maniple; that was far too low a posting for the Intelligence Officer for the entire deployed corps. Still, the MI maniple worked for him; its commander, a Tribune III, took his orders from him. Sometimes, that same tribune muttered, "I'm not in command. I'm just the XO for Legate Triste."
That wasn't quite fair but it was at least understandable. And Triste really did try to keep his hands off the day to day running of the maniple. Still, when he asked . . .
"Goddammit, where did that fucking guerilla battalion go that the air engaged by Sanda yesterday?"
. . . people hopped to find the answer.
"Sir," answered a junior warrant, "If you'll look over here"—the warrant pointed at a map hanging on one wall—"we've tracked that battalion for the last several days. Based on their normal daily progress, and accounting for slowing down as the hills begin their ascent to the mountains, they're somewhere between Sanda and this pass." The warrant's pointer touched lightly on a spot where the track ran through a ridge.
"They're not there, however, or at least not in the strength we've been tracking."
"Yeah, so? Where are they? What strength are they in?"
The pointer touched lightly on seventeen towns spaced about three miles apart within an oval on the map.
"We think they've split up. We think that one group, maybe the core of the battalion, took all or at least most of the horses and ran for it. That would explain why we can't find them where they ought to be. The others are likely in these towns."
Triste sat silently for a min
ute, gazing at the map and thinking on it. Finally, he nodded his head, once, decisively.
"I think you're right. Get me the ops shop."
17/9/467 AC, Sanda, Pashtia
They'd worked out the technique over the long campaign in Sumer. It was helicopter intensive, infantry intensive, and military intelligence, military police, civil affairs, and PSYOP intensive. Thus, the Legion could not do it everywhere simultaneously.
The first the townspeople of the targeted area knew of it, it was announced by the drone of well over one hundred helicopters bringing in two heavily reinforced cohorts of infantry supported by dozens of highly visible attack aircraft flying escort. The townsfolk's initial instincts were to fight. Initial instinctive urges to fight often wither when faced by overwhelming force.
