A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  * * *

  Manuel Rocaberti, too, watched his uncle's speech. His feelings on the subject were far different from Cruz's, however. Only that morning he had spoken to his Uncle, the President.

  "Shut up, Manuel. You owe this to the family," the President had commanded.

  Manuel pleaded, "But, Tio Guillermo, I'm no good. I've tried and I just don't have it. I've no business being a soldier."

  "You're not going there to be a soldier, boy. You're going there to be a spy, my spy. I don't trust Parilla and I trust his pet gringo with the electric eyes even less. Those bastards forced this fucking under-the-table rearmament down my throat. I don't like it."

  "So what can I do about it? Jesu Cristo, Tio, I'm not going as anything or anyone important."

  "Watch, report, impede if possible. It isn't likely that they'll really be able to raise this force, not from scratch. Parilla's never been in command of a real army. And this gringo of his was – what? – a lieutenant colonel? All of that? Even you were a major," the president sneered. "But I want you there to make it as unlikely as possible, even so."

  Interlude

  United Nations Starship Kofi Annan, 29 July, 2067

  The ship onscreen bore a name in English letters, though that name was Chinese.

  The Cheng Ho drifted slowly in high orbit around the planet people back home were already calling Terra Nova, or something similar in their own languages. In Arabic, for example, it was "al Donya al Jedida," in Chinese, "Xing She Jie," though the Chinese were as likely to say, "Xing Zhong Guo" which meant "New Middle Kingdom." Then again, for the Chinese, very little could be even of conceptual importance that was not China and Chinese.

  The Cheng Ho hadn't sent word to Earth in six years, despite having carried several dozen messenger-bots capable of, and intended to, carry news from the ship homeward.

  Like the earlier robotic probe, the Cristobal Colon, the Cheng Ho had taken off, in 2060, propelled by Sol's rays and laser stations positioned on planets, planetoids and in space. The laser stations had, by that year, grown much more numerous and powerful, cutting the time of flight to the rift nearly in half.

  There had been much celebration on Earth when the ship had begun its long journey to the stars. Every country, every ethnicity, and nearly every interest group had a reason to be proud. Indeed, each had a stake in the voyage, on an emotional level at least, as the passengers had been carefully handpicked to be the best and the brightest representatives of their respective ascriptive, ethnic, cultural or national groups. As a matter of fact, not only were they the best and the brightest, much care had been taken to ensure they were also the most forward thinking, the least intolerant, persons available from those groups.

  The crew were not quite as diverse, being largely American, English, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Brazilian with only token members from other nations. But the passengers?

  There were three hundred and sixty-four Moslems, one hundred and eighty-one non-Moslem Europeans, a like number of Americans, roughly three hundred each Indians and Chinese, and about eight hundred passengers from other groups and nations. The average IQ was over one hundred and forty and the average adult educational level the PhD.

  Thus, it had come as something of a shock when, a year after launch, the captain of the ship reported a murder. Moreover, the shock to Earth when he mentioned "rioting youths" was enough to cause an initial news blackout against any further reports from the Cheng Ho as tens of thousand more "youths" rioted in sympathy across the globe The blackout itself was followed by considerable censorship on what news was later allowed, yet clearly the problem of "rioting youths" had remained.

  "Well, nobody's rioting aboard her now," observed the captain of the follow-on ship, the UNS Kofi Annan, an exploration frigate, the first of its class, fitted out to search for and bring back news from the Cheng Ho.

  "No, ma'am," answered an ensign manning the remote sensing station as the Annan reached the outer limits of its sensing range. "With radiation levels that high there's nobody alive on board. Only one shuttle missing, too. And its bay doesn't look like it saw many dockings or take offs. Only light burning, you see, Captain."

  The captain grimaced and nodded, grimly. Hitting a button on her command chair to activate the on-board intercom, she said, "Marines? This is the captain speaking. I want a recon team ready in thirty minutes, full hardened suits upshielded for heavy radiation. Major Ridilla, meet me in my cabin for instructions. Flight deck? Prepare to bring them to the Cheng Ho. I want you to dock and wait to retrieve them. Captain, out."

  Chapter Eleven

  Gold cannot always find good soldiers, but good soldiers can always find gold.

  —Machiavelli, The Prince

  Casa Linda, 5/10/459 AC

  For a change the Casa Linda was quiet. Differently from the past month, this day there were no shouting matches, no screaming in the halls. Even the keyboards and printers of the computers bought to design the force were silent. Above stairs, the only sounds were the hum of the window-mounted air conditioners, the sound of the kitchen staff going about its business, and the steady drumming of the incessant rain.

  None of those sounds penetrated below to the basement which held, among other things, a plain but well equipped conference room. In this the entire staff, minus Lourdes but with Abogado added, had collected themselves for the final decision brief.

  It was informal, that brief, as Carrera (once known as Hennessey) was, himself, informal. He sat at one end of the table that ran lengthwise down the room. The primary staff, some of the important secondaries, and Abogado filled the rest of the spaces. The remainder sat behind Carrera on upholstered chairs in three rows of five. Soult sat at a keyboard, in front and all the way to the right.

  There was nothing on the walls but for three projection screens opposite Carrera and thirteen carved poles with bronze placards and topped by gilded or silvered, carved eagles.

  This is going to be an insufferable data dump, Carrera fumed. God, I hate meetings. Nothing to be done for it, though.

  "Let's get to it," he began. "Matthias, what do we have to work with?"

  The Sachsen cleared his throat and answered, "Not as much as I'd like. Ze most – und, Patricio, I mean ze most – I vas able to come up viz vas seven hundred fifty million. Vorse, you can't use all uff it. I leveraged you zo hard zat you simply must keep a reserve to cover any downturn in your family's fortunes . . . zay, eight perzent. You may be able to use zat, even to dip a little deeper later on, if ze economy improves, generally."

  Carrera had hoped for more but . . .

  "Fair enough, Matthias. Let's see the Table of Organization and Equipment you've come up with, Dan."

  All three projection screens lit up. The two on the flanks showed spreadsheets. The right one was budget, broken down by major element of expense: Pay, Subsistence, Operations, Major End Items, and the like. Some of those were further subdivided as, for example, Major End Items which showed separate entries for Small and Crew-served Arms, Aviation, Armor, Artillery, Transportation, Command and Control, Intelligence, Medical, Foreign Military Training Group, and so forth.

  The left screen was a detailed breakdown by rank and military occupational specialty, or MOS, for the entire force to include the rump that would be left behind to send support forward and train replacements.

  The center screen was a diagram marked "Brigade Table of Organization." Carrera knew it already, in general terms. After all, he'd been in everyone's shit for the last five weeks as they struggled through. The chart showed one unit, marked as a rectangle with a large X feeding to each corner and a smaller one above to show the size; namely, a brigade. The larger X indicated the type, infantry. Above that box and to the right was a number, "4997". This was the strength, not subdivided by rank, they'd agreed on.

  One line ran down from that box to touch another line that ran almost from one side of the screen to the other. Twelve short lines descended from that longer one to a series of boxes.
These twelve boxes had other symbols inside. Four showed large X's for infantry, one marked with the X and oval symbol for mechanized infantry, and one with crossed arrows for special operations troops or "Cazadors." —the word meant basically the same thing as "Jaegers," "Chasseurs," or "Rangers." Still others were marked for Artillery (a single large dot representing a cannon ball), Combat Support ("CS"), Aviation (a propeller), Service Support (SSP), Headquarters (HQ), and Naval (an Anchor). Numbers showing above these boxes ranged from "372" for the smallest unit, the Cazadors, to "578" for the largest, the Service Support people.

  Above each of that series of boxes were drawn two vertical lines, indicating that the units were "battalions."

  "Let's just call a fucking spade a spade, shall we?" Carrera said. "We're forming with the intention of hiring ourselves to the Federated States. That makes us mercenaries even though we may call ourselves "auxiliaries." Traditionally, mercenaries form "legions." Moreover, we're going to be about the same size as a traditional, Old Earth Roman legion. Additionally, if you subtract the aviation and naval groups, we have ten sub-units just as did the legions of ancient Rome. And while we're at it," he added, "note that the sizes of our battalions are a bit small to really be battalions. Call us a legion and them fucking cohorts. Or celibate cohorts, for that matter, I don't give a shit."

  A really good subordinate must sometimes read his leader's mind, even in fairly trivial matters. Carrera had hand picked some pretty good ones. He was unsurprised, therefore, when all traces of the word "Brigade" were instantly replaced with "legion" and all references to "Battalion" became "Cohort".

  "It occurred to several of us, too, Pat," Kuralski explained.

  "No comment, General Abogado?" Carrera asked.

  "Your command and control is going to be stretched with twelve subunits reporting directly to headquarters," Abogado answered. "On the other hand, when I was commanding the old 391st Separate Brigade here I had one mech battalion, plus two infantry, one special forces, one combat support, one military police, an aviation, a service support, a jungle operations school, an attached infantry battalion attending the jungle school, an international school and a headquarters battalion all reporting to me, plus two full brigades of the Territorial Militia that would have deployed here in the event of war. So I think it's in the realm of the plausible, at least. Moreover, I didn't command the air force and naval commands here. Instead I had to coordinate. Command is easier."

  "Yeah, I'm not worried about that. Okay, if we can't afford it, it's a pipe dream. Let's talk money, Dan," Carrera said.

  Kuralski nodded. "The biggest element of expense is troop related: pay, subsistence, allowances, operations, training – which includes maintenance – and training ammunition, for the brigade, err, legion. It's based on paying forty percent of FSA scales, housing them in tents, feeding them at local costs for food . . . "

  Clinton, the supply man, piped in, "Sir, myself and the log officer checked local wholesale prices on that and matched them against FS Army ration schedules. No more than one hundred drachma per man, per month to feed the troops well."

  "Yes," Kuralski agreed, "but we don't know if that would be feeding them what they like. I suspect feeding a good local diet will be a little cheaper."

  "Enough cheaper to make a difference?" Carrera asked.

  "Not really. Might save a hundred D per man for the year. Not even half a million drachma, overall."

  "Okay, continue."

  "Ammunition and personal and crew-served arms are so tightly interwoven that we really need to talk about them together," Kuralski said. "And we never could come to an agreement among us as to which to go with. It makes a pretty whopping difference in cost, at one end, and battle performance on the other, with proficiency in the middle. The short version is that if you buy Volgan, you can afford a war gun, a training gun, and ammunition to the tune of fifty or sixty thousand rounds of training ammunition per man. If you buy Tauran or FS, you can afford one rifle and maybe four thousand rounds per man. Of course, the Volgan arms are simple, reliable, and none too accurate. The best compromise we could come up with was to buy Volgan and add three Draco sniper rifles to each section."

  "What's that save us over buying FS or Tauran with, say, fifteen thousand rounds per man?"

  "About nine million," Kuralski answered. "That's an estimate, we haven't worked out any deals yet."

  "Works. Do it: Volgan, if we can get them. Besides, they're more accurate than they get credit for if they're properly zeroed."

  "We can get them, surely. There are also a lot of Volgan equipment clones out there," Kuralski reminded, "so it's probably fairly safe to plan that way. And Sachsen is allegedly sitting on hundreds of thousands of unusually high quality Samsonov rifles and machine guns, too."

  He went on, "The next largest element of expense is aviation equipment. That isn't counting training on that equipment."

  "Dan and I have worked on that one together, mostly by email and phone," Abogado interjected. "I don't know all that much about training for pilots and such, though I can deal with maintenance training well enough. Most of what he's talking about using is Volgan or really, really simple Tauran and FS birds. I think that, rather than set up an aviation subdivision of the FMTG, we ought to send pilots and maintenance personnel overseas. I've looked into the prices and, in the short term anyway, that would be cheaper . . . a little. Maybe later, once we've got enough local pilots trained and a larger scale organization, it might be worth it to bring the aviation training base home. "

  Carrera looked over the screen showing cost factors. Aviation stood out above everything but personnel and training costs. The figure, "FSD 115,000,000," was a little shocking.

  "How do we save some money there?" he asked.

  "I don't think we can cut numbers, Pat," Dan answered. "What we have listed—eight converted crop dusters for attack birds, twelve medium and four heavy lift helicopters, eight cargo, six recon and twelve remote-piloted vehicles—is about the minimum to do the job. The basis was to be able to lift the critical elements of an infantry cohort and the Cazador cohort in two lifts, assuming an eighty-five percent servocable rate for the transport helos. Almost everything else was based on that. Oh . . . and we'll need two more helicopters for medical evacuation. We can save something if you're willing to go with used, rebuilt helicopters and to substitute short takeoff recon birds for choppers for the medevac."

  "And save how much?"

  "About eighteen million. Note, here, that this is a bad bargain, unless you find more money at some point to buy newer aircraft. Older and cheaper also means sooner to wear out."

  "All right. Buy used. You have a line on used?"

  "For a lot of it, we do. For some we're still looking. IM-71 medium lift helicopters, for example, can be had for about one point six million FSD, each, used. IM-62 heavy lifters run about two point six. New they run over twice that, by the way. We've found nine IM-71s for sale. We're still looking for three. IM-62s are available."

  "Okay, let's talk armor."

  Kuralski laughed slightly. "If you think we fought over small arms, that was nothing compared to the fight over armor. If we thought you could afford it, we'd mutiny before letting you buy anything but Zion-built Chariots. Too damned expensive, even used. Sixty of those would cost two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty million. It would break the bank, in other words."

  "Instead, what you've got there under that sum of 'FSD 84,000,000' is our best guess of what it will cost for a mix of Volgan T-38s and PBM-23s. Until I can go over there—"

  "You?" Carrera asked.

  "I'm the only one who speaks Russian. Until I can go over there, that amount remains an educated guess. We do have fairly hard numbers and figures for some much less capable equipment, T-27s and the like. But that stuff is truly shit, well designed but what's available is so badly made it would be almost as criminal to use it as to not have anything."

  Carrera looked like he had a very sour taste in
his mouth. He mulled the prospect of losing his chief of staff for anywhere from weeks to months and clearly didn't like it. After perhaps a minute of looking sour, he went along. "All right. You go to Saint Nicholasberg as soon as possible to hunt arms. Moving right along, who do we have among the Civil Force competent to command the mechanized troops?"

  Kuralski shook his head. "Xavier says there's no one."

  Carrera thought about that for a minute. Harrington or Brown and I need Harrington as a loggie. He then said, "Brown?"

  "Sir."

  "I dub thee, "Sancho Panzer." You'll command the mech and tanks. You're going to go spend about a month and a half somewhere where nobody speaks a word of English to immerse you in Spanish."

  "Sir!" The single word meant: I won't let you down, Boss. Promise.

  The brief moved along, covering artillery and ground transportation

  "Twenty-four 105mm guns and six multiple rocket launchers will cost WHAT?"