A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Giulia was picked up off the street without incident and taken to a residential basement somewhere in the city. Then men who took her were as polite as she'd expected they would be, being allies and all.

  In the basement, a small TV studio had been set up. Her co-fighters spent a few hours coaching Giulia before she made a teary eyed plea for her government to come to her rescue by withdrawing their troops from this imperialist war and paying the just ransom demanded.

  Imagine her surprise then when, taping apparently completed, her new found comrades tossed a rope over a hook in the ceiling, tied her hands to the rope and hauled her up to her tippy toes. Imagine her greater surprise when she was stripped to the waist and, out of deference to Islamic modesty, turned around to face away from the cameras, her legs being likewise tied by the ankles to bolts in the floor to prevent her from twisting and shamelessly showing her breasts to the camera.

  Neither of those surprises, however, compared to the surprise she felt when the whip first bit a bright red, oozing strip out of her back.

  "Now howl like a dog, bitch," her captors instructed as one of them lay on the whip for another stroke. Still in shock from the first stroke, Giulia shook her head in shocked misunderstanding. No matter, the second lash evoked a piercing scream that was every bit as good as a howl.

  When the flogging was done, another twenty-three strokes later, and Masera sobbing and hanging by her wrists from the rope, the leader and the other captors pulled balaclavas over their faces and lined up three to either side of her shuddering, bleeding body. Into the camera the leader said, "Twenty-five million Tauros," he said, "or this twat gets fed feet first into a wood chipper for the nightly news."

  At that, all the captors raised their weapons above their heads, shouting, "Allahu akbar!"

  SS Hildegard Mises, 16/1/462 AC

  They'd let Nail talk, but only after drilling away most of the enamel on his two front upper teeth. This had been replaced with a temporary filling material. There was no sense, after all, in wasting the good stuff on a walking corpse.

  Talk he did, intending to lie. Sadly for Mohammad, lies required concentration and pain destroyed it. They'd caught him in a lie, a trivial thing, really, from his own badly abused mouth.

  He'd thought he'd get the drill again and shat himself at the thought of it. He'd probably have been happier if they had gone the dental route. Instead, though, they'd moved him to a different chair after stripping off his trousers. Even over the pain, he'd been deeply embarrassed when his captor had stuck something cold and hard up his ass, then put his penis in what looked like a light socket.

  There were things, he discovered, that hurt worse than dental work without anesthesia.

  23 Al Rasul Street, Doha, 17/1/462 AC

  Although weapons were easier to obtain on the Yithrab peninsula even than slaves, the four Sumeris had brought in their own. These were silenced pistols, in 9mm. Other weapons, though it was to be hoped they would not be needed, were secured in the rental car's trunk.

  The team waited near the guarded gate for the chauffeured limousine which always came at this time every day but Friday. Not that they intended to attack the limo, far from it. But the limousine carried four children, two boys and two girls, to and from their school every day. Its arrival thus signaled that all the targets were present at home.

  Seeing the limousine pull through the guarded gate at the front of the mansion, the rental car's driver waited five minutes before following the same course. The gate opened and an ethnic Bengali emerged, wearing a uniform far, far too hot for the climate.

  "May I be of assistance, sayidi?" the Bengali asked of the driver. In answer, the man sitting beside the driver shot the gate guard with his silenced pistol. One man got out to drag the Bengali's body behind some well-tended bushes. The car proceeded through the gate, and into the mansion complex.

  Al Iskandaria Studios, Doha, Terra Nova, 17/1/462 AC

  "I won't show this perversion," Sheik Hamad insisted to the vicious looking man seated opposite him in his plush blue and green themed office.

  Hamad was a study in contrast to his visitor. The sheik was tall and lean, with the sharp features of a desert nomad accentuated by his pure white keffiyah. His visitor was short and a bit overweight, perhaps the scion of some peasant family.

  Probably a Sumeri peasant family, the sheik thought, based on the accent.

  "Yes, you will," the visitor answered amiably. "By the way, have you spoken to your wife today? Why don't you give her a call? They live at Twenty-three Al Rasul Street, do they not? Here, use my cell phone. The number is already dialed."

  SS Hildegard Mises, 19/1/462 AC

  Nail knew they were working over his captured comrades, just as they had worked over him. He knew it because they often played his comrades' screams over the speakers in his cell when he was not, himself, under the torture.

  They'd gotten pretty direct in their approach. They were being direct now.

  "What is the address for the safe house you used in Ciudad Balboa?" Mahamda asked.

  The captive spat out an address. Mahamda consulted an earpiece stuck into his right ear and shook his head, sadly. "Your answers don't match, Mohammad. You know the price of that."

  "Please . . . no . . . I am telling the truth," Ouled Nail begged.

  "Perhaps you are and perhaps you are not. Listen to this." Mahamda turned on a speaker so that Ouled Nail could hear the pleading screams of his comrade. Nail couldn't know it, but the transmission was on a time delay controlled by the interrogation team to ensure that no one undergoing questioning could, between screams, coach anyone else on a story.

  "He's just lost a fingernail," Mahamda said, calmly. "Now it's your turn." He flicked off the speaker and turned on a microphone. He nodded at an assistant.

  Mahamda's assistant grabbed Ouled Nail's middle finger on his left hand firmly, then took a pair of needle-nosed pliers and jammed one end under the nail. The terrorist shrieked into the microphone then, sobbing, begged, "For the love . . . of Allah . . . please . . . please tell them . . . the truth."

  It took three nails each before the addresses given matched perfectly. There were seventeen more nails to go, along with much skin, many teeth, and a virtual infinity of nerve endings. Indeed, there were more than enough nerve endings to learn everything Ouled Nail had ever known or even suspected.

  Neue Ulm, Sachsen, 21/1/461 AC

  Senta Westplatz was busy packing for her return trip to Sumer. An agent of the freedom fighters was supposed to give her the tickets at the airport. In the background Fernsehen Sachsen droned. Senta paid no attention to the television until she heard the name of a friend and comrade, Giulia Masera, mentioned. Even that really didn't catch her attention – Giulia was often in the news – until she heard the words, "kidnapped" and "torture."

  She ran to the TV barely in time to catch the last four strokes of the whip that set her comrade to howling, much like a dog. Hand clenched over her mouth as she watched the spectacle, Senta was simply horrified, so much so that the knock at the door barely registered until it had been repeated several times.

  Finally, Westplatz did go to the door, pulling her hijab over her hair automatically as she walked.

  "Yes? How may I . . . ?" she asked the deliveryman standing there, impatiently, while holding a wrapped package.

  The blow to her solar plexus came as a shock to Senta. She went down like a sack of rice, loosely and almost without a sound. The delivery man entered the apartment, closing the door carefully behind him. He hit the woman once again, hard, in the chest. She wouldn't be screaming for help any time soon. From his pocket he drew a very small digital camera with which he took a short video of Senta moving feebly and gasping for air.

  Returning the camera to his pocket, he then squatted down by the shocked almost-corpse and picked it up. He looked around quickly and identified the bathroom. Then he carried Senta to it, stripping her body and placing it in the tub. Another few second were spent
recording that scene as well. After putting on some rubber gloves, he flicked the switch to close the drain and turned the tap to let the water fill.

  Taking a towel with him, the delivery man then went to the kitchen and carefully opened the drawers until he found a sharp knife. He had one with him, of course, but it would be better in the short term if the implement came from the house. Returning to the bathroom he found that Senta, still gasping desperately, had sat up. He pushed her back and grabbed her left wrist, which he twisted toward the far wall. Senta struggled but feebly.

  With the knife he made a long slash lengthwise up the radial artery. The cut went deep and blood spurted out, staining the tiled far wall and turning the water filling the tub red. The delivery man released the arm and took another short video of the blood flowing. Then he took that hand and wrapped it around the handle of the knife, holding it firmly. With this he made a not very deep and deliberately ragged cut up the right wrist. Then he let both knife and hand go free. He watched for a minute as blood loss took away consciousness. When the water had mostly filled the tub he shut off the flow and waited for ten minutes. A quick check of the carotid confirmed the woman was quite dead. He took some more video of the corpse.

  The delivery man then retrieved the package and removed from it a change of clothing, another pair of rubber gloves, a false moustache, a digital camera and a plastic bag. He exchanged clothing, putting his old, blood-spotted clothes in the bag and the bag back in the package which he rewrapped loosely. He put on the gloves and began to search the apartment. Since no suicide was very likely to be packing a bag for a trip, he returned the articles of clothing to what seemed logical places. In the course of his search, he found a folder at the bottom of the bag. He did not find any air or train tickets. The folder he set aside for the moment.

  Continued searching of the apartment turned up nothing further, not even a computer. Walking to the door, folder and package in hand, the man stopped to listen for a few moments. Nothing. Then he opened the door, exited, and closed the door behind him.

  By the time the police began to suspect that Senta had been murdered, the assassin would be long gone, leaving no personal trace. The video would be posted on the Globalnet as a warning to other Kosmos who might be inclined to help the Salafi Ikhwan.

  SS Hildegard Mises, 24/1/462 AC

  The walls of the cell were covered with color photographs of the victims of the bombs he'd helped set off in Balboa. He couldn't escape them; his eyelids had been sewn open. When he looked at the pictures, in his mind's eye he saw his own family laid out butchered as he was sure they would soon be.

  Mohammad Ouled Nail wept as the cell door opened in front of him. Mahamda entered with that small dark man – Fernandez, he was called – who seemed to be in charge. Another man, taller and lighter skinned than Fernandez, stood there as well.

  Nail's hands were bandaged but blood oozing from the fingertips had stained the white gauze red.

  It wasn't just pain that made Nail weep; it was also the shame.

  He'd thought he was tough and brave. He'd thought he had faith in his God. He'd been sure they could never break him. He'd been sure, too, that he could lie.

  He knew, now, in his innermost being, that there was no God. He knew he couldn't keep a story straight when in agony. And he knew he couldn't take the pain.

  His joints were, half of them, dislocated from the little metal framework – the "Scavenger," they'd called it – they'd placed him in and tightened. They hurt almost as much from the decompression chamber he'd endured. His face – they'd made him look in a mirror – was blotched with burst blood vessels.

  The evil looking infidel, Fernandez, made his pronouncement. "Murdering bastard! Turn him into a woman, then hang him . . . .her . . . it." Then, horror of horrors, the evil infidel had bent down and whispered, "I'm sending a team to exterminate your family in Castilla, you son of a bitch."

  * * *

  Topside, far from the screams, Carrera and Fernandez sat on a large pipe, staring across the dark vastness of the ocean toward the lights of the Yithrabi coast. In these confined waters the ship rocked gently, slowly. It didn't matter; Carrera was sick to his stomach anyway.

  "Do you ever have nightmares, Omar?" Carrera asked of Fernandez.

  The Balboan shrugged. "Everyone has nightmares, Patricio."

  "Do they?" He shook his head. "Not like mine, I don't think. Not like mine."

  "Did you know," Carrera continued, "that I was raised to be a civilized man? I don't advertise it but my mother and father were progressives, cosmopolitans, in fact. I sometimes wonder if that's why I was able to transfer my loyalty from the Federated States to the legion; because I wasn't raised to be loyal to the Federated States, even though for many years I was and, to some degree, still am. An interesting thought, is it not; that maybe the end result of the destruction of ties to nations is not loyalty to mankind, but loyalty to even smaller and more exclusive groups than nations? To family most of all."

  Fernandez's mind was not the sort to worry abut such things. He kept silent. Besides, what was wrong with having an ultimate loyalty to one's family? As far as he could see that was the default state of mankind.

  Carrera flicked a cigarette butt over the side, then reached for a tumbler of whiskey resting on the deck by his feet. From this he drank deeply.

  "Ever read any Shakespeare from Old Earth, Omar? Henry the Fifth, maybe?"

  Fernandez shook his head in negation. "I've heard of it; that's all."

  "No surprise, I suppose. It's a play; never underestimate the benefits of a classical education. There's a scene there . . . where the king insists that he is not to blame for the condition of his soldiers' souls should they be killed in battle for him."

  Carrera laughed, bitterly. "Damn old Will. He answers the questions he wants to but not the one you want him to. Tell me, Omar, what do you think? If Henry's soldiers had sacked Harfleur, would he have been responsible for the sack? For the rape of the "shrill shrieking maidens?" For the dashing of old men's heads to walls? For the "naked infants spitted upon pikes?" Where would the blame lie then?"

  "Patricio," Fernandez began, "I don't thi–"

  Carrera cut him off. Nodding his head toward the hatch that led into the bowels of the ship, he asked, "And where does the blame lie here? Who is to blame for that obscenity taking place below? If it's you, does that relieve me of anything? I don't think so."

  Sighing, Fernandez asked, "Do you want me to shut the program down?"

  Taking another hefty slug of the whiskey, Carrera coughed and then answered, "That's the worst part; no."

  Ic (Intelligence Office), Balboa Camp, Ninewa, 29/1/462 AC

  Thank God Patricio didn't succumb to the weaker part of his nature, thought Fernandez while sitting at his desk in Sumer. Bad enough he shows too light a hand with some of our adversaries. But we must have the information that comes out of that ship, whatever it costs.

  The desk sat deep inside the Intel Office which was the most secure building in the camp. It was built of a double wall of pressure formed adobe bricks with the interior space filled with earth as well. The office was surrounded by another wall, this one topped with barbed wire and with a tower at each corner of the compound. Guards manned the tower, the narrow gate, and the inside of the building continuously.

  There was no air conditioning; Carrera simply forbade it on the theory that troops given air conditioning would never grow acclimated to the heat, which was, while drier, even worse than Balboa's. The four exceptions to this rule were the religious facilities, the field hospital, the troop messes and the small brothel quadrant full of Sumeri whores, most of them widows or orphans.

  So instead of air conditioning, Fernandez sat under an overhead fan. Paperweights – generally of steel, glass, or fired clay – held the papers on the desk in place against the breeze of the fan.

  It was better to be seated. After days on the Hildegard Mises Fernandez found himself still swaying when he walke
d on dry land. He hoped it would go away soon.

  It had been worth it, though. Normally Fernandez was, while willing enough, not a man who enjoyed inflicting pain. This time had, obviously, been different.

  They were still on the ship, the one named Ouled Nail and the other three who had survived. They'd be hanged when they'd healed from their surgery; be hanged, incinerated and their ashes dumped out with the garbage.

  Big mistake to survive, Fernandez thought. Worse mistake to survive after killing my blood and then being captured. Bastards. Well, let's see what today brings.