A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  "Tell the pig to kiss my ass, Pedro," Belisario answered. "The war goes on until we are, all of us, free."

  * * *

  Resolution 4999 (2127)

  Adopted by the Security Council on its 16128th meeting,

  On 1 June, 2127

  The Security Council,

  Recalling its previous resolutions, in particular resolution 4547 of 2107 and 4569 of 2108, concerning the situation off world among the colonies of Terra Nova,

  Reaffirming its commitment to peace, prosperity and freedom as expressed and implied in the Charter,

  Welcoming a just resolution to the ongoing conflicts on the planet of Terra Nova,

  Acknowledging the difficulties inherent in administering and securing a world light years away,

  Reiterating in the strongest terms its desire to accord self-determination to all mankind,

  Stressing the importance of the recent peace accords between itself and various insurgent governments and movements on Terra Nova,

  Welcoming the joint communiqué between its representatives on Terra Nova and the representatives of the United Front for the Liberation of New Earth,

  Expressing its continuing responsibility toward the peoples of that world and its firm commitment to their continuing welfare,

  Determining that the maintenance of its rule on the world of Terra Nova is beyond its abilities,

  1) Retires its offices and security facilities to its base on the Island of Atlantis on the new world,

  2) Requests a cease fire from all still-engaged armed or political agencies, governments, organizations and movements on the new world.

  3) Reiterates its request for prisoner of war exchange and repatriation,

  4) Directs the redesignation of its fleet around the new world as the United Nations Peace Fleet, to be further renamed the United Earth Peace Fleet at such time as the General Assembly may direct, and

  5) Declares the conflict on the new world to be at an end.

  Chapter Thirty

  We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,

  We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,

  —Kipling, Gentlemen Rankers

  Ninewa, Sumer, 10/5/462 AC

  Fadeel al Nizal's problems had multiplied. On the plus side, though, at least Mustafa was no longer one of them. If anything, the relationship had reversed itself with Fadeel becoming a major financial supporter of the rest of the movement and Mustafa being along mostly for a distant form of moral support. Not that the movement didn't have money. It had a great deal, most of it untouchable for the infidel accountants who watched for the slightest excuse to freeze suspicious accounts. Even Fadeel had lost money that way.

  He'd have gladly accepted a great deal more of Mustafa's former chiding if he could have eliminated some of the other things bearing down upon him.

  For a while it had seemed that the willing cooperation of the Kosmos – the cosmopolitan progressives who believed in one world government, under themselves – were the answer to most of his prayers. With the money gained from the crusader governments with the progressives' cooperation, his organization had flown as high as the aircraft he had managed to bring down early on in the campaign.

  For a while, rather than having to listen to lectures from Mustafa, Fadeel had found himself in a position to repay the start-up money he'd received and even to make a substantial gift to his principle. That gift had been gratefully received, Mustafa having fallen upon rather hard times. Moreover, he'd managed to knock one crusader state, Castilla, almost completely out of the war. He'd failed to knock Balboa out of the war. That rankled. Worse, they were hunting down and killing his men. And the damnable locals seemed to be helping them do it, which was worse.

  Unfortunately, the supply of Kosmo hostages had dried up completely. There were no more Taurans willing to volunteer, nor had there been since that one woman, Giulia Masera, had been fed feet first into a wood chipper and a tape of the murder turned over to al Iskandaria News Network. Fadeel was still puzzling over what had caused al Iskandaria to broadcast the tape. After all, they'd been wise enough to refuse to show the death of one of Masera's countryman when he had defied Fadeel just before his well-deserved execution. At the time, Fadeel had been rather angry at the television network for refusing the tape. On reflection, though, he had come to agree that showing a citizen of the crusader coalition dying bravely and well would have been damaging rather than helpful.

  At that, it would not have been nearly as damaging as broadcasting the death of Masera. She had been emulsified from the bottom up, her mouth opening and closing like a fish stuck out of water as she sank feet first into the wood chipper, her reddened, lumpy remains spitting out the bottom. Fadeel had rather enjoyed the show, naturally, but even he had seen it was a dangerous move for whichever comradely organization had been responsible.

  That was another puzzle. Fadeel didn't know and had not been able to find out who was responsible for that execution. He'd thought at first that it must have been one of his own cells, naturally under very loose control due to the circumstances of the fight for God in Sumer. Not one of his people, however, had been willing to admit to it. Nor had any of the ransom money shown up.

  I could surely have used another twenty-five million Tauros in the fight against the crusaders.

  Not everything was going against him, fortunately. He'd had a few bad moments there, when the satanic Federated States had introduced automatic explosive sniffers. A number of bombs and great quantities of bomb making material had been lost to the cause of the righteous and the just that way. Then the local mercenaries had brought in dogs to hunt for and warn of bombs.

  The solution had been both beautiful and elegant in its simplicity. Fadeel had set some hundreds of young boys with small spray bottles to randomly spraying wheel wells of automobiles and trucks with water with which minute quantities of powdered explosive had been mixed. When everything smelled of bomb then nothing smelled of bomb. The dogs and the operators of the sniffing machines had been driven half insane, Fadeel and his followers had had a few good laughs, and more than a few crusaders had been enticed into the range of actual bombs.

  Now the dogs were used only for tracking and the sniffing machines sat uselessly in a warehouse somewhere in Babel. Better still, the flow of explosives continued as it had before the infidels had tried their clever tricks.

  Thinking about that, about the machines sitting idle and useless, set Fadeel to laughing yet again.

  He sobered immediately. It wasn't enough to make up for the fact that after Masera's grisly execution the weak crusader governments had refused to give any ransoms. More than three dozen kidnappings and executions without so much as a drachma changing hands was enough to convince him it was a losing game.

  Fadeel supposed that the charge of bad faith, after the Masera butchery, was enough to shield those governments from the domestic fallout of not paying.

  When the governments had a reasonable and obvious chance to get 'their" people back alive the pressure was tremendous. Now? Now nobody trusts us to deliver the goods.

  Oh, yes, his people still went after the humanitarians and the journalists. The FSC even tried to stop them or rescue the peace-lovers in the other parts of the country. Here around Ninewa, for some reason, the Balboans generally didn't even make the attempt. And the other aid workers, the ones Fadeel thought might elicit a response from the mercenaries? Those were always too well guarded to even try.

  Maybe they want me to kill off the ones I take. Something to think upon, anyway. Fadeel scratched his head in puzzlement. He was, at heart, a fairly simple man rather than a devious one. Grand strategy was Allah's job, not his. He was for fighting.

  For that fighting he had a new recruit as well, though this particular recruit's time in the organization was destined to be short.

  * * *

  Ishmael Arguello, an earnest boy of seventeen, had taken the death of his mother hard. The younger of the two boys,
and the handsomer if not the brighter, Ishmael had always been his mother's favorite. Moreover, Layla had been the center of Ishmael's universe. He had been cast adrift when Layla was cut down in cold blood. His father had been little help. No more so had his brother. School friends and teachers had been sympathetic, of course, and when one of the teachers had suggested continuing his mother's work Ishmael had decided that that was for him. The teacher had also, very considerately, put the boy in touch with a . . . recruiter, for lack of a better term. That was close enough.

  * * *

  The overhead fan turned slowly and quietly in Fadeel's basement office. He sat on a cushion on the floor, his legs crossed underneath him, feet pressed against thighs, while he continued to muse on his problems.

  In some ways this enemy understands us very well, Fadeel thought, damn him. In other ways he is almost as ignorant as the rest of this crusader alliance. He knows, for example, that disadvantaging clans by killing some of their workers causes more discontent. Why he never followed through on that understanding to the logical conclusion that killing very large numbers of clan members would destroy his enemies and serve as a salutary lesson to other clans, I just don't understand. He knows, absolutely he knows, that we are a people who take revenge. Why he can't figure out that he should eliminate people who are sure to become enemies by reason of the blood of relations . . . well, it's just impossibly foolish.

  I understand that in Taurus and the FSC, guilt and innocence are entirely individual matters because their people are individuals, individuals who can be encouraged and deterred by what happens to them, personally. But here, we are not individuals. No system of punishment can mean as much to us without a collective, blood-related, aspect.

  Of course, some of the bastards do understand that. How many times have I had my men lost to the infidel because he rounded up twenty or so clansmen from clans sympathetic to the cause of Allah, tried them for crimes and threatened to hang them if information – oh, and captures, of course – was not forthcoming? More than I care to count. How many times have the clans captured, bound, and turned over my holy warriors to secure the release of their kin? I can count how many, but I'd rather not.

  And now, instead of the insurgency being fed by locals as I had planned, I have more foreign born mujahadin than I do Sumeri. And the supply of foreign born will dry up, too, if the enemy ever figures out how to target their families back home. Pray Allah, they never shall.

  Fadeel cut his musings short. He had people to meet, notably some new volunteers to the cause.

  * * *

  Ishmael was given some travel funds, just enough to see him to the next station on his journey. From home he'd traveled by bus halfway through Bilad al Sham, spending several nights in a safe house in the capital while there.

  The safe house had been a shock after the spacious, well furnished and maid-swept expanse of his own home, back in Akka. Besides being cramped and filthy, Ishmael had found himself with the first case of lice in his life.

  If the quarters had been bad the food was . . . well, the less said about the food the better. The most that could be said for it was that it prepared a man for leaving this life without regret. After a few days of undercooked rice and goat with the hair still on what was there to fear with death?

  From the safe house, Ishmael had moved on to a school, of sorts. This was where he was to be trained. Surprisingly, his training, along with that of another four boys about his age, was not very military. In fact, based on the little Ishmael knew about the subject from his mother, it wasn't military at all. Certainly it was nothing like the courses of instruction Layla had told him about her having attended in her glorious youth. He never even saw a rifle, except for the two in the hands of the guards posted at the front gate to the school's walled compound.

  Instead, Ishmael's training was ninety-nine percent religious, though whether the Prophet would have recognized it as such was debatable. It was geared, in the main, towards producing a young man willing to martyr himself. At that, the school was very efficient, especially when it had good material to work with.

  * * *

  "You came looking for martyrdom," Fadeel observed to the new recruits. "We shall help you to find it. More than that, we shall help your martyrdom to be of the greatest effect here on Al Donya al Jedidah. To that end, each of you will make a tape. In those tapes you will explain yourselves and your commitment to the cause of Islam, Triumphant. The tapes will later be broadcast by al Iskandaria to inspire the masses and bring yet more volunteers. In the end, we cannot lose. There are over a billion of us; few of the crusaders."

  Fadeel smiled benignly at the martyrs to be, the smile changing in a moment from benign to ferocious. Voice rising, he said, "By your courage, you will earn a place in Paradise and bring us victory here."

  Al Kuwaylid Girls School, Ninewa, Sumer, 12/5/462 AC

  Ishmael felt ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous, he felt dirty.

  Bad enough they'd shaved his face and made it up to look more girlish. After Fadeel's people had rigged him with a suicide vest they dressed him in hijab and even added a veil! It hadn't been made any better by the profuse apologies and explanations they'd offered either.

  Ishmael had grown up in liberal Akka. He didn't think girls were all that inferior a sex, or not more so than most boys anywhere on the planet would think. But for all that he didn't want to be one or to look like one.

  They'd insisted though, harping on the theme of, "Your mother would be proud of you. More than changing clothes; she changed her entire face." In the end, of course, Ishmael had gone along, letting them shave him, make him up, load him with thirty pounds of explosive and shrapnel laden vest and bra, and rig him with a radio so that his handler could direct him and talk him through his part. They'd even coached him on walking like a girl, easier to seem to do in a burka than in any kind of infidel garb.

  He wasn't allowed to drive himself to the vicinity of the school even though he'd had a license for almost two years.

  "You don't know the area," Fadeel's people had explained. "You don't know which checkpoints are tighter than a houri's hole and which are manned by more easygoing sorts. You don't know where to park. Besides, how can your control direct you if he can't see you? You don't have the right accent if someone stops you. No, Martyr to the Cause," they'd insisted, "we will drive you."

  Ishmael had been dropped off around the corner from the school. Doing his best to walk girlishly he'd turned that corner, walked about fifty meters forward and joined the stream of girls – some dressed in burkas or hijab and others in more modern clothing – that flowed through the gate and into the school yard.

  Once inside the gate the girls who wore them had begun immediately to remove their Islamic outer coverings. Several were quite pretty and shapely, Ishmael noticed, with big brown eyes being the norm. They spoke to each other in high musical voices he found most enchanting and . . .

  "I can't do this," he said into the radio that ran from his explosive vest to an earpiece cum microphone. He turned to leave the school.

  Sadly for Ishmael, more sadly for the girls at the school and their families, the radio had another purpose besides control. It also served as a remote detonator. With or without any words from Ishmael, the controller's instructions were to detonate it when a certain time had passed after Ishmael had walked through the gate or if it appeared he wanted to back out. That time was up. So was Ishmael's.

  So was the girls'.

  Balboa Base, 12/5/462 AC

  The bottoms of Carrera's and Sada's boots were stained red. That was as nothing to the red Carrera was seeing, a seething bloody red that arose to infuse his brain and cloud all his thoughts.

  Fernandez was waiting for them at Carrera's and Lourdes' quarters. She was horrified, weeping. Carrera was simply outraged, though he mostly hid it behind an automatic stone mask.

  "Have you seen the al Iskandaria broadcast, Patricio?" Fernandez asked, after Lourdes had dragged Carrera to a ch
air and forced a scotch over ice into his hand.

  "No, why?" Carrera asked evenly.

  "Our girlabomber was the son of that woman we had taken out in Akka, Layla Arguello. It was broadcast half an hour ago." Fernandez's look said more eloquently than could have any words, And that's your fault.

  "Fuck."

  "Fuck," Fernandez repeated. Neither he nor Sada bothered to remind Carrera of their advice concerning the family of the Arguello woman.

  Unconsciously echoing Fadeel al Nizal's thoughts of a couple of days earlier, Sada observed, "Your Christian heritage of individual accountability has no use here, Patricio. It can never be of use in a place where the individual places so much importance on family ties. Moreover, you seem to insist that groups cannot be responsible for the actions of individuals. This is nonsense, my friend, and worse, it's immoral. Mothers and fathers raise their sons to be such and must be held accountable. Moreover, by your own laws of war you hold organizations accountable. When the organization is a family it is illogical not to hold them equally accountable."