A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  "I should burn you alive," Belisario said. "I should burn you alive, you bastard, but there isn't time. Still, you won't live to gain revenge for this." He raised his machete high.

  Four hundred and fourteen local years later all that remained of a very beautiful woman, one of Belisario's many multi-great grandchildren, would be interred very close to the spot where High Admiral Kotek Annan's hand and head rolled free of his body.

  (And that, boys and girls, was how the office of High Admiral of the UN Space Fleet and its successor, the UEPF, was rendered non-hereditary.)

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  My troops are just poor . . . boys in rude shirts, but they're good soldiers, and they'll soon have better shirts.

  —Charles XII, of Sweden

  The new year saw some material things change while many remained the same. Desert uniforms changed to a new tiger-striped and pixilated pattern Carrera had ordered from a company in the FSC. Another pattern was created for the radically different jungles of Balboa, Carrera believing that any pattern which tried to do both would do each only half as well, if that. The loricae, the silk and glassy metal vests the legion used for body armor remained the same. The basic design of their Helvetian helmets didn't change, but they grew lighter as a new model, likewise manufactured from glassy metal, made its appearance.

  Two new rifles were in development. Both were in 6.5mm. The nearer to perfection was a Volgan design, the Bakanova, superficially similar to the Samsonov already in use. The Bakanova inside was radically different, however, having a rammer to half feed a fresh cartridge during the extraction process and thus increase the rate of fire to eighteen hundred rounds per minute, for two rounds anyway. This made burst fire a practical and useful capability for the first time in a general issue rifle on Terra Nova. To take full advantage of the burst fire capability, the Bakanovas were to be modified to fire a Montgomery Arsenal 6.5mm Jotun cartridge. The barrels were also modified – increased by four inches – to take full advantage of the more powerful round. The Bakanovas, however, had not yet been perfected.

  Even there, an improved rifle was only considered to be a stopgap. Carrera wanted something new and had formed a group under Terry Johnson to investigate possibilities. Among the possibilities being looked at were combustible casings, semi-combustible casings, electronic priming with the rate of fire controlled by a computer chip in the rifle, near simultaneous feeding and extraction to bring the rate of fire up to two thousand rounds per minute, and carbon fiber wrapped thin steel barrels to reduce weight and improve cooling.

  There were some new rifles issued, but only for the snipers. These came in three calibers, .34, .41 and a reduced charge .510 that, with a silencer attached, was extremely quiet. For these rifles, frightfully expensive in themselves but with money no longer being so much of a limiting factor, thermals sights were obtained.

  Two new machine guns, a heavy in .41 and a general purpose MG in .34 were likewise under slow development.

  Mortars and MRLs remained unchanged: 60mm, 120mm and 160mm mortars, and 300mm rocket launchers. Artillery was being switched from 122mm to a 155mm lightweight gun pirated by the Volgans from an Anglian design. The numbers grew, too, from the seventy-eight systems the legion had first gone to war with, inching upward to the one hundred and fifty-two it would need to field when it reached the equivalent field strength of a full division.

  Helicopters and fixed wing aircraft had, so far, proven mostly satisfactory. The Turbo-Finches were retained, but modified for additional armor protection for the pilots and with a semi-active defense system against shoulder fired surface to air missiles added. This came at a small cost in ordnance carried but, in the circumstances of a guerilla war against small, scattered, and for the most part poorly armed irregulars, Carrera considered it a fair trade off. The IM helicopters and NA cargo aircraft likewise had done good work and were retained. Some of the NA-23 Dodos were converted to aerial gunships firing a mix of ordnance, .50 caliber, 23mm and 40mm. Like the artillery, the numbers of aircraft increased towards the final goal of one hundred and thirty-two deployed systems, exclusive of aerial medical evacuation.

  Heavy armor had proven mostly good enough during the invasion and the subsequent occupation. Contracts were let, therefore, for an additional six hundred and ninety combat systems, mixed tanks and Ocelots, exclusive of simple armored personnel carriers, to be delivered over four years. This was enough, if barely, to keep Khudenko's factory in Kirov employed. Some of his workers were invited to Balboa to set up a depot for heavy maintenance on the armor.

  One of the legion's larger purchases, in every sense, was in the form of an old light aircraft carrier, once called Her Anglic Majesty's Ship Revenge, and more recently known as the Amazonia. This had been offered for a price not much above its value as scrap metal or about the cost of three Jaguar tanks. It needed work, of course, before it would be fit to fight, but its engines were good and it could already sail. It also needed a trained crew, for which purpose Abogado's FMTGRB added another subdivision. Other ships for the naval classis of the legion were manned and, approximately, ready sooner.

  The legion was growing. It had to; the insurgency around it was growing even faster. Worse, it had spread.

  Pashtia, which had fallen very quickly to the FSC led coalition, was already showing some signs of future problems as the Ikhwan reconsolidated in neighboring Kashmir and sent teams forward to contest the land. Carrera expected it to become a major theater of war again, though it would be, he thought, some years.

  Within the oil states of the Yithrabi Peninsula there were terrorist strikes wherever the local government chose to accommodate the wishes of the FSC. From Mustafa's point of view the results of these strikes were a very mixed bag. In some cases, true, the government had ceased such support to the infidel. In others, disastrously, it had instead struck back at the Ikhwan, arresting and imprisoning holy men, sometimes even as they preached the jihad from their pulpits. Worse, the government security and intelligence forces had taken to searching out and destroying Ikhwan cells, seizing weapons caches and, most damnably, interfering with the flow of money to the cause.

  Along the northern border of the Volgan Republic there had been some remarkably effective strikes, proof to the Ikhwan of the holiness of the cause. No longer could Volgan mothers pack there children off to school without fear. No longer could Volgan soldiers march with impunity, even within their own country.

  Uhuru was beginning to see flare ups, some trivial but many quite bloody, between Christian and Moslem factions. Overall, the Moslems had the edge there, however. Long lines of black Christians and Christian-Animists now marched as coffled slaves towards the markets of Yithrab. Meanwhile highly civilized Taurans and progressives in the FSC wrung their hands and wept at the plight of the Uhurans. That, however, was all they did. After all, weeping and hand wringing made them feel virtuous while forceful action would have been a rebuke to their worldview.

  It was actually quite easy to trace the troubles. All one had to do was run one's finger over a map of the planet. Wherever Salafis or Salafi inspired or controlled Moslems shared a border with anyone else – Christians, Christian-Animists, Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus . . . anyone – that border was awash in blood. Even at sea blood was beginning to flow as Salafi pirates in the Nicobar Straits and along the coast of Xamar attacked shipping for loot, ransoms, and slaves.

  Santissima Trinidad, Bahia de Balboa, 3/1/462 AC

  The surplus special operations and patrol boat was capable of mounting up to ten .50 caliber machine guns or some combination of those and either 30mm or 40mm grenade launchers. It could have been fitted for missiles or torpedoes as well, but in this case was not. Indeed, only four of the possible ten weapons stations were filled.

  She was low and lean and predatory. Made of aramid and carbon fiber composites, the boat was eighty-four feet from stem to stern and seventeen and a half feet in beam. Capable of better than fifty knots, it was one of, if not the, fas
test things smoking on the water.

  That his crew was only half trained, the boat's skipper, Warrant Officer Pedraz, knew. Then again, I'm only about half trained, too. How much training do you need to run down a yacht moving at fifteen knots? Not much, I think. It's an easy target to practice intercepts on. Hopefully they won't mind too much.

  The target yacht was named The Temptation. This seemed fitting to Pedraz, since his patrol boat had Santissima Trinidad painted across her stern.

  It was just a routine run, a training run. They approached from astern to within one hundred meters of the Temptation. Pedraz had no idea that there was anything amiss with the yacht until he heard frightening cracking sounds splitting the air overhead.

  "Holy shit, Chief, that fucking boat is firing at us!"

  The speaker was Able Bodied Seaman Miguel Quijana, a young recruit to the legion's classis. At barely seventeen, Quijana had never before been shot at.

  Well, dammit, neither have I, thought Pedraz as he ducked low behind the boat's superstructure, his finger pressing the klaxon for "battle stations."

  When you've got the range advantage, use it, the Chief remembered one of his FMTG instructors telling him. Gunning the engine, Pedraz twisted the wheel hard left and swung his boat past the Temptation. The Trinidad's wake caused the Temptation to rock, upsetting the aim of the men aboard. The chief kept a nervous watch behind him until he had determined his ship was out of small arms range.

  He put his head up. Each of the .50 caliber machine guns was manned by two anxious looking crewmen. He nodded to them and turned to face the yacht. Moving at only twenty knots or so, the Trinidad closed the distance, aiming for an intercept point about two hundred meters ahead of the yacht.

  "One hundred rounds per gun," Pedraz ordered, when he judged the position right, "FIRE!" Immediately the air was rent by hundreds of powerful muzzle blasts a minute. The recoil wasn't enough to rock the boat or upset the gunners' aim. Downrange, however, the superstructure of the yacht began to come apart under the hammering of high velocity fifty caliber slugs. Even with a half trained crew, the fire was fierce enough that several of the gun-wielding men aboard the yacht went down, ripped apart by the heavy bullets. The others soon dropped their weapons in abject terror.

  Slowly, the Trinidad approached, her crewmen rocking with the boat and keeping their machine guns trained on the yacht. One two-man gun crew could not see the yacht as the Trinidad's own cockpit blocked their line of sight. These Pedraz selected to board with him, along with the boat's cook and one of the radar crew.

  "Spoon!" Pedraz shouted to the cook. "Draw five submachine guns out of the armory. Francais," he said to his second in command, "take the con. I'm boarding."

  "I've got it, Chief," Francais answered.

  Thus armed, all five men of the boarding party loaded a small rubber boat with a motor. This sped, cook manning the outboard, to cross the short distance between the two boats, leaving a white wake V-ing out behind it.

  Blood dripped out the runnels in the yacht's side, Pedraz noted, as the rubber boat touched the target's side. He went first, keeping the yacht's passengers covered until a second sailor, ABS Dextro Guptillo, could board. Then he tied the rubber boat to the yacht. The rest of the sailors followed.

  None of the yacht's crew resisted. Most were down anyway, dead, wounded, or having shat themselves silly. After making sure the remaining few were disarmed, Pedraz ordered the Trinidad over. The crew conducted a thorough search of the yacht, stem to stern.

  Pedraz expected drugs. There weren't any. Failing that, money? Not much. Arms? Only what had been used to shoot as his boat.

  He was puzzled, really puzzled. Why the hell did they shoot at me? Makes no sense. It was a serious overreaction to our playing games. He asked one of the unwounded men on the yacht and got a sullen answer. That also made no sense. And then it hit him, Castilian accent . . . bombings in Castilla . . . similar bombings here. Bingo.

  Balboa Base, Ninewa, 3/1/462 AC

  Fernandez's daughter's murder remained a festering hate within him. He nursed that hate, guiding and developing it from a small planting into a full-blooming tree. He didn't let it distract him from his work.

  "Where – where the fuck – are the explosives coming from!?" Carrera asked Fernandez as he looked over the latest casualty figures from roadside bombings in the BZOR. His anger was not at his chief of intel, but at the enemy.

  Fernandez rubbed a finger over his upper lip. He answered, "The . . . ummm . . . ship reports that they're coming in from Farsia right across the border and from Bekaa by way of Bilad al Sham. They're being bought from either the Volgans – the criminal organizations there, not the government – or the Zhong. Some, too, may have been bought in other places. A fair amount was bought right here. The money appears to have come from Sachsen."

  "Sachsen? That Westplatz twat?" Carrera asked.

  "So I would surmise, her and some of the others."

  "Evidence?"

  Without a word Fernandez turned in his wooden swivel chair and, opening a cabinet, extracted a thin red file. This he handed over.

  Taking the file and opening it, Carrera began to read. When he was finished, he said, "Get Sada and bring him here. I have a mission or three for some of his special workers."

  "Wilco, Patricio. By the way, next week I need to go visit the Hildegard Mises. We have some special prisoners I want to see to . . . personally."

  Carrera thought on that and suspected it meant Fernandez was going to oversee something that a man ought not oversee, not if he wanted to keep his soul. He didn't want to see it, either. Nonetheless, he said, "I think that, this time, I should join you there."

  SS Hildegard Mises, 9/1/462 AC

  Mohammad Ouled Nail spat at Warrant Officer Mahamda as the latter set about giving the customary tour and demonstration. Mahamda looked questioningly at the short, wiry, dark man standing nearby.

  "I think the tour will be unnecessary," Fernandez said. "Let's go right to interrogation."

  Nail lifted his nose and clamped his mouth shut, almost theatrically. I won't say a word to you pigs.

  Fernandez just smiled as two stout guards picked up the bomber of Castilla and Balboa and carried him, struggling, to a dental chair. They expertly strapped him in to the point he was almost completely unable to move.

  Silly man, Fernandez thought. You should have thought a bit more carefully on what it meant when you were tried, sentenced to death, reported hanged, and yet found yourself here.

  A sort of articulated cage was fitted onto Nail's head, with metal projections to fit between gums and lips and blunt-tipped screwbolts to hold the head to the frame. The guards set the helmet on Nail's head and began turning cranks on each side of the helmet. When it was firmly affixed, a far from painless process in itself, they rotated the jaw separator down. Nail refused to open his mouth, of course. One of the guards picked up a small hammer and deftly whacked Nail between the legs. That opened his jaws for a scream. They then forced the device into his mouth and turned another crank which spread the device, separating the invading bits of metal and forcing the terrorist's lips and jaws apart.

  "He's ready, Doctor," one of the guards called out. In walked a white jacketed dentist who looked over the arrangement and nodded satisfaction. The dentist put in earplugs and covered his ears with muffs. Then he picked up one of his drills and stepped on a pedal. The drill began to whine.

  Nail's fear-filled eyes followed the drill bit as it inched closer to his mouth, ultimately crossing just before the bit touched enamel.

  In a few moments he was screaming, pleading, begging to be permitted to talk, but over the whine of the drill no one seemed to be able to hear him.

  Ar-Ramadi, Ninewa Province, 14/1/462 AC

  Giulia Masera didn't have Westplatz's local connections. Still, she wanted to help the cause. Indeed, she'd been fighting for the cause all her life. For the better part of the last year she'd been fighting in the role of a journalist, uncover
ing the misdeeds of the FSC and its running dogs. When a Sumeri, apparently having noted her sympathies, approached her with the offer of a kidnapping to both raise funds for the resistance and discredit her own fascist government, she jumped at the chance. She'd have made the offer herself if she'd only known where to find members of the resistance.

  If one had asked a Roman Catholic why he or she believed in the Bible and the teachings of the Church, the nearest to an honest answer might have been something like, "That's how I was raised." Masera was not different. She'd grown up at the knee of the hero of her life, her grandfather, who had been an anti-fascist partisan in her native Etruria during the Great Global War. Both her mother and father had been Marxist activists and had made the easy transition to cosmopolitan progressives.

  She didn't like the Salafis or even the more secular terrorists she supported. But when she considered the evil she saw in the FSC, in capitalism, and in the travesty that passed for democracy, she saw something that justified even support for murderers, oppressors of women, and theocratic fascists. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils.