A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  * * *

  It took Clean and Cheatham some days to work out the plans and the requirements. Still more time was spent in negotiations with local leaders for the leasing of land. After that it took more time for PSYOP and word of mouth advertising to assemble work crews. Within a month or so, however, about fifteen thousand of the otherwise unemployed Sumeris had found work in base construction. This was less of a drop in the bucket than it seemed as each Sumeri with money to spend created jobs for the otherwise jobless.

  It helped, but not enough.

  Zabol, Pashtia

  Fadeel al Nizal was a man with a problem.

  Actually, I have more problems than I can count. Starting with this one.

  "This one" meant Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana. And Mustafa was not a happy camper, nor even a happy troglodyte.

  "You shame me for being a member of the same race," Mustafa stormed. "I gave you money, hundreds of thousand of FS drachma, and what do you show for it? Nothing!" he raged. "I've given you access to our data base to recruit your own group and what have those you have recruited done to resist the infidel? Lain around buggering each other for all that anyone can see!"

  Abdul Aziz ibn Kalb, standing well off to one side, flinched even though he was not the target of the tongue lashing.

  "Sheik Mustafa," Fadeel began, "I admit, we were taken by surprise by the speed of the infidel conquest. But then," and Fadeel looked around at the walls of the cave as if to say, Aren't you a little surprised to find that your impregnable Pashtia, the Pashtia that did to death the might of the Volgan Empire, is reduced to this little hole in the ground?

  "Don't try me, little man," Mustafa glared. "If we are here it is due to the will of Allah. He is the great strategist. Ours is but to fight in His cause."

  "Indeed," Fadeel agreed. "And all will turn out well, even in Sumer. But we do have problems there."

  "Like what?" Mustafa demanded.

  "Number One is a turncoat Sumeri general named Sada. For reasons I dearly pray the Almighty will reveal to me someday, this man fought the infidel gloriously . . . and then surrendered and joined him. Worse, this Sada, the dog, took his brigade over with him."

  "He is in the infidel's pay," Mustafa said, with a glare of hate. "His family must pay."

  "Easier said than done, Great Prince. The turncoat's family is already beyond our reach. Those of his men will be . . . harder to identify and find. We are working on this."

  "Ah, so you actually have done something."

  "We have done what we could. I have just over one hundred future martyrs operating in Sumer. About twenty of them are in the area of the traitor, Sada. It would be more except that about half, or a bit more, of what I sent simply disappeared. I suspect he has a network of informers. And I can't eliminate the informers without knowing who they are. I can't find out who they are without getting more of my people in place. And I can't get my people in place, as long as the area crawls with informers. Only in the city of Ninewa, mostly because it is of a size that makes it impossible to identify strangers, have I been successful in infiltrating. That; and that there been a major displacement of people and disruption of society wherever there was serious fighting."

  "And you have a plan for the use of what you do have?" Mustafa asked, growing visibly calmer.

  "I do. Noting that everything is in the hands of the Beneficent, the Merciful, still I am prepared to begin attacks against these crusaders very soon."

  "With what?"

  "I have too few men to conduct a proper suicide campaign at this time," Fadeel admitted. "But I can do kidnappings, I can plant bombs, I can do some assassinations. Watch and see. There are munitions scattered unsecured all over Sumer. My people are buying these up. Very soon the invader will feel our sting."

  Ninewa, 1/4/461 AC

  Tariq Mohsem was one of the town's few Christians. A bit shorter than most of the Sumeri norm, and also a bit stouter as befit a normally prosperous shopkeeper, he was also one of the first merchants to reopen for business. Tariq's shop, one of Ninewa's largest before the invasion, was a general store that sold food along with some dry goods, household appliances, tools, and such.

  He'd returned to find the shop looted and heavily damaged. He had some funds, not the worthless Sumeri pounds but hard currency from the FS and TU. It had been his escape money. Instead of using it to escape with his family, however, he'd decided to stay and rebuild. Factoring large in that decision had been the very forthright way the occupying forces – or liberating, for those who insisted on more aesthetic terms – had shown early on that they were intent on maintaining order. Perhaps the clearest indicator of this was the young man Tariq had found dead in the shop, though visible from the street, hanging by the neck from a cross beam – Who would have thought a neck could stretch that far? – and with a sign on his chest proclaiming, "Looter."

  "If the invading forces provide safety and order," Tariq had told his wife, "why not stay? This is home, after all."

  So, instead of using the money to flee, Tariq had hired a couple of carpenters to put his shop back in order. The rest he had used to buy food from the invaders. He had to admit, they'd charged a fair price.

  "Thank God," he'd also said to his wife, "that they are, too. If we were further north, in the Anglian or FSC sector, they'd be giving the food away and no one would shop from us."

  Things were going well enough, so far, too. He'd bought the food at about forty percent of what the invaders told him he could sell it for. And don't the bastards stop by from time to time to make sure I'm not gouging, too? Of course, that doesn't stop me from taking some of the grain and trading it for other foodstuffs which I can mark up rather more than that.

  With the profits, and given that he was one of the first stores to reopen, Tariq not only hired two assistants, he also took on an armed guard for the evenings when he closed shop.

  Of course, not everyone had a job yet. The six thousand or so men employed by the legion, locally, were only a fraction of those needing work. On the other hand, those six thousand with money created a certain amount of work on their own, as did the men of Sada's brigade and even the damned foreigners. In any case, Tariq was finding business picking up almost to pre-invasion levels. As to whether it would drop off again, as more competition re-entered the market; who could say? Tariq hadn't gotten where he was by inability to compete or to work hard. Indeed, in a freer market he expected to do rather better.

  * * *

  No one noticed when the tall, slender man with the oddly and unevenly shaped eyes pulled the beat up, dented and dirty white van to the front of the store. Even the lack of a license plate excited no interest; many, perhaps even most, of the automobiles operating in the town were unlicensed. Perhaps they had once had licenses; who knew?

  The slender fellow had a friendly face, although anyone who saw him probably thought it seemed a bit distant. He fiddled with something in the van, something below door level. No matter, everyone in the country was still in a state of shock, even those for whom the shock was not unpleasant. Nor was there anything particularly suspicious in the driver's reaching below the dash.

  Opening the van's door and stepping out, the driver simply walked into the store. No one thought it odd that he consulted his watch and left after approximately four minutes. And no one walking by the storefront connected the man departing with the parked van.

  Standard military time fuse burns at a rate of forty seconds per foot. The fuse had been cut to a length of fifteen feet. Thus, between the time he reached below the dash, and subtracting a few seconds to enter Tariq's store and five minutes inside, the slender man had just over four minutes to walk away at a fairly leisurely pace. He was almost three hundred meters away when . . .

  * * *

  "What the fuck was the point?" Carrera asked Sada.

  "I'm not sure," the Sumeri answered. "Does it have to have a point?"

  The two men, surrounded by legionaries with a few of Sada's men a
s well, stood in front of what had once been a store. The street was mostly still there, barring only a four foot deep crater, but the front of the store itself was gone. Indeed, much of the back was gone as well. Bodies and parts of bodies remained. Some of those parts were very small.

  "Do we know how many people?"

  Sada asked one of his men before answering, "At least fifty-seven. That many are more or less intact. As to the parts . . . " – he spreads his arms, shrugging – " . . . hard to say."

  Carrera's eyes focused on one very small part. It was a leg, small, slightly olive in tone, with a shoe on the foot. A baby girl's leg, he thought. A baby girl . . . like my Milagro. So fucking what if she was a Moslem, she was still just a baby girl. Bastards!

  Sada looked at the legate, looked away quickly, and offered, "It is no shame to cry, my friend. The shame would be in doing nothing about this atrocity."

  Wiping a hand across his face, which did little more than streak the dust that had gathered there, Carrera forced the sorrowful tone away and asked, bitterly, "What can we do? It's in the nature of these things that they leave little evidence."

  Sada laughed grimly. "Remember what I said about us being the sort of people who become exceedingly resentful about losing family members? Well . . . I think we have here the recruiting brochures" – his hand swept the scene, taking in the bodies and parts of bodies – "to acquire some numbers of people who will do anything to get even for what's just been done to their family. Watch and see if I'm not right."

  He bellowed something to one of his officers supervising the soldiers at the bombing site. The officer came over and Sada spoke to him briefly. Then he turned back to Carrera and said, "I've just ordered Lieutenant Faroush to round up as many relatives as he can find and bring them to the university. I don't suppose your people are up to teaching a course in counter-terror? No? Well, we'll think of something. After all, it isn't as if we Sumeris have never had experience in crushing dissidents."

  Village of Qadir Karam, Ninewa Province, 10/4/461 AC

  Sada's adjutant had narrowed the number of applicants down to thirty-six.

  Since this was Sada's adjutant, the officer didn't do the normal thing for Sumer and select based on who could offer the highest bribe. Instead, he screened out those too old, or too young, those who didn't look strong enough and those with wives and children still living. Not that the others were turned away completely. Instead, they were redirected to neighborhood militias. Some joined; some did not.

  After that, the adjutant selected for intelligence and desire for revenge. This required personal interviews, literacy being far from universal in Sumer and vindictiveness something that could never be objectively tested for. This process took time but narrowed the number of suitable candidates considerably.

  Those few dozen were gathered now in a plain and somewhat run-down adobe mosque in this plain and ramshackle Sumeri town. Indeed, the only brightness to the assembly came from the flickering lamps along the walls and the shining, hating, vengeful eyes of the men assembled. Along with the few dozen were another, smaller group of specialists Sada had recruited from the Dictator, Saleh's, secret police.

  "So," Sada began, in addressing them, "you have agreed to give up your old lives, to become instruments of justice and vengeance? Excellent. Let me tell you what you are going to do. In a few minutes I am going to turn you over to one of my officers and a couple of special people he has selected to teach you how to become the instruments you wish to be. Before that happens, I am going to take your oaths, in the name of Allah, that you will obey every order you are given without question. You will be trained, over the next few months, in how to kill. More than that, you'll be trained in how to kill in the most terrifying manner. After that, you will return to your homes. In time, orders will come. You will gather in small groups to prepare and then you will hunt down and kill – or otherwise punish – those whom you are told to, wherever they may be and who or whatever they may be.

  "Let me explain something to you, two things, actually. One is that once you have taken the oath, you may not release yourself from it. Your families are hostages, wherever they may be, for your continued obedience. The second is in the nature of what you are to do.

  "You see, there are three kinds of terrorism. The first is what you have suffered, random acts of senseless violence. This kind almost never works," Sada sneered. "Witness the Federated States of Columbia. When their people were randomly killed, they merely went to war to exact vengeance and destroy the terrorists. Two regimes, here and in Pashtia, which formerly were great supporters of terrorism around the world, have fallen. More than that, as boys in school you all read – at least those of you who had the chance to attend school did – of the great terror bombings of the Great Global War. That was all random terror; it targeted nobody in particular. Note that no one ever knuckled under to them until nuclear weapons were used. So much for random terror.

  "The other kind of terror is specific. With this kind, punishment is inflicted on particular persons, either on themselves or on those whom they love. To be the target of specific terror is a fearsome and terrible thing. Specific terror works. If it didn't, would the dictator have lasted a week?"

  The eyes of the men assembled seemed to glow. Yes, yes, they thought. This is what we want: specific terror.

  "The third kind of terror is genocidal. With this an entire people and even civilization is threatened with destruction. Thus, it includes specific terror because, if all are killed, then all whom you love are killed as well. Anyone who does not believe that this kind of terror works is a fool. Genocidal terror was all that kept the Federated States and the Volgan Empire from destroying each other and, incidentally, probably us as well. Genocidal terror is probably all that keeps the United Earth Peace Fleet and the Federated States from using nuclear weapons on each other now."

  "So there are your three types. The kind that was used on you and brought you here and the other two, which are the kinds you will use to retaliate. Are there any questions?"

  Seeing there were none, Sada said, "Very well. Stand and raise your right hands . . . "

  University Compound, Ninewa, 12/4/461 AC

  Ricardo Cruz was just leaving the gymnastics building where he had showered when it happened

  The first warning was a flash in the distance, behind some houses in the town. Next came the muffled sound of a small explosion. Then came the first blast, much nearer. Only after that could anyone make out the freight train rattle of incoming mortar rounds.

  Cruz screamed, "INCOMING!" as he threw himself into partial shelter at the angle where steps met building wall.

  The rounds came in at even intervals, a dozen of them, about two seconds apart. Whoever was on the other end apparently knew what he or they were doing. They landed with about thirty meters between shells, moving in a slightly arcing line from near the broad front steps to the main office of the campus and across an open field. Between the even spacing and the even timing it was the obvious work of a well trained mortar crew, using the traversing wheel on the bipod to quickly and expertly lay the rounds. Before the last round had landed someone caught on the field was screaming out in pain.

  "I knew this shit was too good to last," Cruz muttered as he picked himself up from his temporary shelter and then ran to offer aid, toward the still incoming blasts.

  I swear I will kick my own ass if I ever go to the showers without my body armor again.

  * * *

  The mortar attack was over almost as soon as it began. Automatically, the legionary Command Post's duty officer ordered a reaction century of mechanized troops and a mixed flight by a Turbo-Finch and a Cricket.

  The Cricket was airborne in minutes, the Finch following almost immediately thereafter. The mechanized troops were bursting through the university gate to race into the town scant moments later.

  Mistake. Big mistake. Big, bad, fucking mistake.

  * * *

  Khalid al Marri kept in the s
hadows atop the half wrecked apartment building. It was the same building which had been taken by the now departed FSA 731st Airborne Brigade. People lived in it, still, but not in anything like what had been its pre-war capacity. That was a shame, because al Marri's mission was to get the crusader dogs to overreact, to kill some number of the civilians now living inside. Ah, well; between his own surface to air missile and the other one located a kilometer away and overlooking the same area, one was sure to take down a crusader aircraft and cause a reaction.

  From his vantage point, al Marri saw the flashes of the mortar firing and the impact of the shells inside the university compound. Not much time now.

  Despite his prediction, al Marri was still somewhat surprised at how quickly the enemy got aircraft into the air. Just like the dogs, to have airplanes standing by to kill the people, he thought, his heart overflowing with hatred for the infidel invader.

  To the outsider, privileged to look into al Marri's mind, that would have seemed incongruous. There he stood, ready to do his best to bring violence and destruction down onto the innocents of the apartment building beneath him, and hating those he intended to provoke into that violence because of their willingness to engage in it.