Finally, they informed the population of their remaining fate. All of the men would be brought into their society as second-class citizens, but conversion and enthusiastic support of the Warriors of the Lord, they were promised, would bring fast advancement in the new society. The male children would no longer attend any of the regular schools in Summersville, but special schools staffed and run by the Warriors, where they would learn to become proper citizens of the new society. They’d end up brainwashed puppets of the Warriors. Catch a child, any child, young enough and you can bring them up to believe anything. The Warriors would ensure that they became as fanatical as the remainder of their group…and, though them, control their parents.
The women would be worse off, although not as badly off as the slaves. All female-owned businesses were ordered to close, or to be handed over to the male employees, and women were ordered to remain in the home unless escorted by a male relative. They would be expected to remain silent at all times, to obey male orders at once without question, and to wait hand and foot on their husbands or male relatives. They were strictly forbidden to bear arms, seek legal redress for any mistreatment, disobey their husbands under any circumstances and resist his sexual advances…or sexual advances from any of the Warriors. Four lesbians in Summersville, who had lived there ever since retiring from the city, stood up and flatly refused to obey such ‘stupid, sexist, laws.’ They were promptly grabbed, beaten, gang-raped and finally chained up and left to die. The lesson had sunk into the eyes of everyone watching.
The young girls wouldn’t be going to school any more either. They would learn how to behave at their mother’s elbow and wouldn’t be allowed anything like the freedom of the male children. Hell, their only education would come from their mothers and the Warriors and the latter, at least, would be based around obeying the men. They wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to read, or write, or use a computer, or anything that might give them any kind of power. They certainly wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to use weapons. They weren't being put in headscarves and veils yet, but it was probably just a matter of time. The Warriors were a sick male fantasy given flesh.
I had to admire the cunning of the scheme, even as I despised it. The Warriors had made everyone compliant in their crimes against humanity. The men in the town would be forced to take responsibility for their womenfolk, which would, in turn, force them to keep them under control. The women, knowing that they could be raped at any moment by any warrior, would want to stay indoors anyway; being thrown out of the house would be fatal. They would find themselves being broken down, bit by bit, into the model women – as the Warriors saw the model women – as reality and the hopelessness of the predicament sank in. They would have no choice. If they accepted the Warriors and their laws, they would find themselves trapped and bound to obey. If they refused…well, a horrible death awaited them.
It got worse. They’d made the men compliant in their crimes, which made it much harder for them to stop committing crimes, or to escape the Warrior control. Why do you think that the really evil and unpleasant gangs like the Tongs or the Mafia insist on newcomers committing murder for them as their first test? To kill someone, anyone, would change them forever and make it impossible for them to escape punishment, if they went to the authorities and confessed. They had sinned against what they believed to be right and the mental stigma would keep them firmly in their place. We rarely found Warriors who were willing to surrender to us in the early days of the war.
For Summersville, the next week was a nightmare. The Warriors patrolled everywhere and didn’t hesitate to hand out any punishment they felt the situation deserved, from a whipping to immediate death. A handful of women, caught on the streets unescorted, were raped at once and then dumped back into their homes, there to wait for their menfolk. Resistance was quickly and brutally quashed; the handful of people who tried to fight back were quickly apprehended and killed. A handful of others escaped, somehow, and fled into the darkness towards us, but for most people, the noose held them firmly in place. They were trapped and at the mercy of the Warriors of the Lord. They were helpless.
There are basically two ways to run an occupation; hard and brutal, or soft and gentle. The Warriors favoured the former and had enough manpower and determination – or sheer unthinking fanatical belief – to make it stick. Given time, obedience would become habitual and the town’s will would be broken. They thought that they had all the time in the world. They might well have been right. In Iraq, we simply hadn’t had the manpower to dominate the entire country. The Warriors were operating on a much smaller scale and with much more ruthlessness. They seemed unbeatable.
We should have intervened at once, but we had problems of our own.
The Warriors intended to destroy us all.
Chapter Thirty
The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation.
-Robert A. Heinlein
“They’re coming, sir,” Dutch said. “I can almost smell them.”
I nodded. There was a faint smell in the air, a hint of burning, mixed in with the indefinably awful smell of dead or dying humans. We had raced down to the FOB as soon as we had heard the news, with Biggles high overhead providing what aerial reconnaissance and air cover he could, but I had the nasty feeling that I wouldn’t be dictating the terms of our next engagement. Summersville had fallen to the enemy and, with that in their hands, they would know far too much about our defences. They would certainly know about the FOB…
After all, I thought grimly, where else had their messenger gone to deliver their message.
“We’ve interviewed all the refugees, of course,” Dutch said. We hadn’t kept the location of the FOB a secret in Summersville. It might have been a security oversight, but it might also have worked in our favour. “Only forty-seven people made it out, so far.”
“So far,” I agreed, staring into the distance. A tall column of black smoke was rising into the air from the direction of Summersville. Were they cooking everyone a meal, I wondered, or were they burning witches at the stake? I wouldn’t have bet against the latter. The Reverend Thomas McNab had been very clear on just how extreme – and unconnected to the remainder of Christianity – the Warriors actually were. “What have you done with the refugees, Dutch?”
“In a field, under armed guard,” Dutch said promptly, and I sighed in relief. “We had most of them cuffed to stakes or anything else that was reasonable convenient, just in case, apart from the ones we can vouch for personally. We have several dozen people here who came from Summersville and could identify most of the refugees.”
“Good,” I said. I hated to treat American citizens as potential enemies, but there was no choice. The Warriors of the Lord, just by pulling off a basic Trojan Horse trick, had made it difficult, if not outright impossible, to trust any other refugees. I recalled, once, a girl I’d met who had raved against the police, because they’d arrested her on suspicion of being a car thief. A liberal is a conservative who’s just been arrested. She’d been soured on the police permanently. “I think we might want to think about relocating them to Stonewall, or at least the ones we can’t trust…”
“Or even the ones who might have relatives in Summersville as well,” Mac put in, from where he'd been peering into the distance. “I wouldn’t put it past them to play the hostage game.”
I grimaced. I’d seen that before, in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it had never been anything other than yet another horrific atrocity. The terrorists had taken someone – normally, but not always, a man – and told him that if he didn’t spy on us, or take a bomb into an attack position, or do something else for them, his family would suffer. I always hated seeing that, not least because it was much harder to blame the victim, even if he had been trying to kill me at the time. How could I blame him for doing whatever he needed to do to keep his family alive? It wasn't as if we’d started with a good reputation as a trustworthy group…and don�
�t get me started on some of the various Iraqi or Afghani units. They were sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes corrupt…and if you picked the wrong unit, the results could be disastrous.
“True,” I said, shaking my head. Take a random group of people – say twenty or so – from a city and chances were that none of them would be related. Do the same in a small town and you’d probably have several relatives right there, or close personal friends. I had no one in Ingalls who was related to me, with the possible exception of Rose, who had been my lover for months, but Mac had an entire family. Dutch had a family of his own in Salem. What would they do if the Warriors got to them? “What can we do about that?”
“Short of boosting security and trying to watch for people slipping out of our lines, I doubt that we can do anything,” Dutch said, grimly. “We don’t have the manpower to rotate anyone who might be remotely suspect – sorry, might be threatened or coerced into becoming a spy – out of the area.”
“Yeah,” Mac said. “If we can’t stop them here, plenty more fuckers are going to turn to them and convert to their nutty faith.”
I nodded. A report out of Summersville had suggested that at least a hundred people, mainly men, had converted to the Warrior faith. I wanted to believe that it was a trick, but the paranoid part of my mind wondered if it was something else, perhaps even a series of real conversions. A person’s behaviour changes, sometimes sharply, when the environment changes…and the inhabitants of Summersville had already lived though one massive change in the environment. How many of them would seriously consider converting to the new faith?
Stockholm syndrome, I thought, glumly. It was an article of faith among the SP community that hostages, held long enough by any group of terrorists, would start to lean towards the terrorists and their point of view. It was a defence mechanism in the human mind, I suspected, one that made their torment a little more bearable. It also explained how…compliant women in various parts of the world were with their own treatment. Resistance of any kind was seriously counter-survival. If the entire town was firmly under the Warriors and there was no hope of resistance, then it was quite likely that some of them would break under the strain and convert. They would rapidly end up becoming the most loyal servants the Warriors could hope for. After all, they would have burned their bridges behind them.
I said as much. “Yeah,” Dutch agreed. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“We should go after them,” Mac said, firmly. “Ed, we have nearly a thousand soldiers here, with enough ammunition to fight a major battle. Why don’t we take the offensive now?”
I wanted – needed – to agree with him. The Marine Corps trains its people to seize the initiative at all times and to operate inside the enemy’s decision-making loop. I was sure that the Warriors would be far more cumbersome than we were, even though most of the ‘soldiers’ Mac was talking about had never seen a battle in their lives. Apart from the veterans, the only soldiers who had seen a battle were those who had gone after CORA. It wasn't the finely-tuned force that I had fought in back in 2003. We hadn’t known how lucky we had been at the time. They might be better than the Warriors, but if they attacked against a strong defence…
We might get chewed to ribbons.
And I couldn’t allow that. We didn’t have enough manpower to waste any of it. I wanted to intervene as much as Mac did, but I knew something about Summersville’s defences and I knew that if the Warriors had repaired them – and with so much slave labour, it would be fairly easy, if time consuming – we would lose hundreds of men butting our heads against them. It would be much simpler to force them to attack us, break them – I wouldn’t allow them to slip a force into my rear – and then recover Summersville. The only question was how long I could wait for them to attack before the demands that we attack became irresistible.
I explained that to Mac and Dutch. Dutch accepted the argument at once; he’d been watching helplessly, after all, as the Warriors secured Summersville and the surrounding area. There had been a handful of skirmishes, but neither side had seen fit to press the offensive. Mac was much less impressed, pointing to the American citizens trapped inside the town, at the mercy of the Warriors. The reports we had received of the disarming of the population and the soul-crushing repression had not been encouraging. I would have liked to have believed that the townspeople would rise up against them, but I doubted that that was possible.
“Ed, we can’t leave them there much longer,” he protested. “We have to save them before there’s nothing left to save.”
“And we could end up winning the battle,” I pointed out, “and losing the entire war.”
I cursed – yes, again – the shortage of intelligence. The refugees had suggested that the Warriors in the town numbered in the thousands. If that were all they had, taking the risk of attacking might be justified, but I had a sneaking suspicion that their numbers were much higher. High enough to absorb the losses from our attack and keep coming? If they didn’t care if they lived or died – a common problem when fanatics were involved – they might be quite happy to take five to one losses…and keep coming. We couldn’t endure that for long.
“We can’t risk it,” I said, finally. One thing I like about the military chain of command is that it is inviolate. (Of course, like all strengths, it can be a disadvantage at times. The man on the spot normally has a better grasp of what’s going on than the guy skulking in the rear areas, or in Washington, trying to micromanage at very long distance.) “Mac, we cannot risk heavy losses.”
He nodded, sullenly. “I don’t know how long our morale will hold up,” he said. “It looks very much as if we’re just waiting here and allowing them to get on with it.”
“They’re going to attack us,” Dutch said, firmly. “We’re blocking their route up to Ingalls and the other Principle Towns.” Salem, part of me noted with a droll moment of amusement, was northwards of Ingalls and would probably be the last to fall. If the Warriors had the resources to attack all of the towns at the same time, we might as well seek the best terms we could for surrender. “They have to come here, Mac, and when they do we’ll beat the holy living shit out of them.”
“Of course we will,” I agreed, grateful for the change in subject. I shared Mac’s desire for immediate action, but I couldn’t agree to take the risk. Not for the first time, I wished for the entire 1st Marine Division, or even the 3rd Infantry. Hell, I would have sold my soul for a few more heavy weapons and tanks. “We’ll just inspect the defences and then wait for intelligence from the scouts.”
Dutch had taken the precaution of sending a handful of scouts out to try to gather what intelligence they could. I doubted that they would learn much – they weren't fully-qualified SF soldiers, just people who liked sneaking around – but it wasn't something that we could overlook. I had sent Biggles down here for the same reason, after all, and I’d even had a nearby field adapted to serve as an airfield. I’d have liked an entire squadron or two of Apaches, but I’d settle for Biggles and his aircraft. I could even hear him buzzing around in the air.
He'd also done well with the defences, I agreed. They’d dug trenches, emplaced barriers and concealed mines everywhere that the enemy might use as a line of advance. The designer of the defences had had a nasty sense of humour, Dutch said; he’d used barbed wire to catch unwanted guests, trapping them in the line of fire from emplaced machine guns, or leading them into minefields. There were parts of the defences that looked criminally weak, at least to civilian eyes, but that was a military trick as old as war itself. The enemy would come onwards, scenting victory, only to run into pre-registered mortar fire and other, nastier tricks. Patty and Stacy, two of seventeen snipers, even had places to hide and work their deadly art.
“The Warriors of the Lord seem to like outlandish costumes for their leaders,” Dutch explained, when I questioned having the girls so far forward. “If we’re lucky, we can pick a few of them off and hopefully dissuade the bastards from pressing their attack.
”
“Hopefully,” I agreed, grimly. The young men manning the ramparts – or running through exercise after exercise – all looked confoundedly young. Very few of them had any conception of what they were about to go though, if the Warriors attacked…no, Dutch was right, the Warriors had to attack. They might have been fanatics, but they had to know that we were sitting right in front of them, and if they bypassed us, we would tear their supply lines wide open. They hadn’t played it stupid so far and I doubted that they would change now. They’d come after us once they were confident that they had enough firepower to blow us into orbit. “What about the GOTH plan?”
Dutch looked grim. I didn’t blame him. The GOTH plan – the GO To Hell plan – is for when all else fails. It was normally attempted while the lines were disintegrating and command and control was falling apart. It wasn't the kind of plan any halfway competent commanding officer would attempt to use; hell, it was rare for them to look good even on paper. If we had to use it, with barely-trained soldiers and ill-prepared plans, we were likely to be fucked when everything went badly wrong. I wouldn’t even consider it…except it was my duty to consider it. I was the command, after all, and the buck stopped with me.
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 28
