A Desert Called Peace

XV.

Sneezing at the dust assailing his nose, Fadeel climbed to one of the highest spots in the city-a thin, graceful minaret that soared over the walled compound of a mosque. Try as he might, Fadeel had never been able to obtain one of the thermal imagers the FS forces seemed to use everywhere. He did have a number of Volgan-built passive vision devices-relatively cheap and simple light amplification scopes-but these were much inferior. In any case, it had proven impossible to train his men to use them or, as important, maintain them. He did have a few superior Haarlem- and FSC-made passive vision scopes, but these used odd batteries and were, for the most part, useless now.

Harder to get a hold of the batteries than it is to get explosives, Fadeel thought bitterly. He had no idea that many an FS Army and FS Marine Corps supply sergeant had had the same thought over the years.

The scope Fadeel had with him he had batteries for, enough, at least, for a few nights' work. It had once been mounted on a rifle. That mounting was broken now, had been broken, as a matter of fact, in the action in which the scope had been captured. Still, it did perfectly good service, if only for reconnaissance.

Fadeel flicked a switch. The scope came on without the noticeable and annoying hum of the Volgan versions. He raised it to his eye. A folding rubber sphincter kept the green glow of the thing from lighting up that eye as a target for a sniper until it was safely pressed to his face.

From this vantage point Fadeel could see west, southwest, and south. The lights of the helicopters that landed and took off in seemingly endless numbers drew lines in the scope. They were not bright enough to permanently harm it, however. Looking down, Fadeel saw groups of men stringing wire. Some of them seemed to be laying mines.

" What? Do the crusader Marines think I am stupid enough to attack them in the open where they have all the advantages? Not likely, that. I could order some sniping, I suppose, but to what purpose? They're too far away to hit- and despite having a fair number of sniper rifles Fadeel knew his men were not great shots at any range- and the return fire might be devastating. Besides, what do I care if they wire in the whole city? The humanitarians will still make sure we are fed. "It's for the children, after all." Fadeel laughed softly and bitterly, thinking of very small bodies hanging from the bridge behind him. "For the children."

While Fadeel sneered, high, high above those gently swaying bodies the NA-23 nicknamed Lolita circled. Lolita carried, this sortie, five two-thousand pound bombs. Another five were carried in her sister, Anabelle. It was believed that the bridge that could take four of five direct strikes with two-thousand pounders hadn't been built yet and, even if it had, it had certainly not been built in Sumer.

The bombs were only a moderately heavy load, but most of the extra two and a half tons more lift still available to the planes was taken up with fuel. The aircraft could loiter for quite some time.

Ninewa-Pumbadeta Highway

Sumer's old dictator, Saleh, had expended considerable capital on modernizing the country, though "modernization" was, itself, a word open to some interpretation. One of these programs had been to give Sumer a truly modern highway system. It would have been more accurate to say that Saleh had given Sumer a post-modern highway system, in the same sense that post-modernity meant familial corruption, vice, graft, kickbacks, bribes… and a shoddy product.

Carrera had actually spent quite a bit of the legion's money, and hanged more than a few Sumeris who sought graft, turning that highway system into a model within the BZOR.

Despite the improvements, the armored columns stayed off the asphalt highway except at the bridges over streams and irrigation canals. There was no better way for a heavy force to strangle itself, logistically, than to drive on and thereby destroy the very roads down which ran its lifeblood of fuel, food, parts and ammunition. The columns raised great clouds of dust. With the wind blowing from the west this was little problem to the drivers of the westernmost column. For the soft-skinned, untracked vehicles, which included the military police, engineers, and artillery prime movers moving along the hard surfaced road, and for the other armored column moving in the dirt east of those, it was a misery of choking, stinging dust.

A PSYOP vehicle, a four-wheel-drive light truck, preceded the column. Loudspeakers mounted on it proclaimed that any interference with the column would mean the destruction of whatever town the interference was met in. The tone of the speaker and the words suggested very strongly that the people of such a town would not survive the experience. There was, unsurprisingly, no resistance whatsoever. The people stayed inside and closed the shutters to their hovels, each of them hoping that no hothead would take a shot at the foreign soldiers. In several cases village elders confiscated arms and held them in order to prevent any such incident.

NA-23, Lolita, above Pumbadeta

Jimenez's voice crackled in Miguel Lanza's headphones. "What have you got for me, Lolita?"

"X-ray Juliet Five Two this is Lolita. I'm two NA-23s out of Ninewa Air Base carrying five two-thousand pounders, each, on GLS guidance systems. Per coordination my mission is to take out the bridges."

"Do it, Lolita."

"Wilco, out."

The previous jury-rigged bombing system was history now. Instead of that, there was a specially built rack and drop system that could be installed for those rare occasions when a cargo aircraft was called on to do double duty as a precision bomber.

Lanza flicked the switch for the ramp, which lowered itself with a vibrating, hydraulic hum. He was lead bird, thus he didn't have to buck the turbulence of a Nabakov ahead of him. At this altitude, and despite the season, cold air rolled in as soon as the ramp began to drop. The strong smell of kerosene exhaust entered the aircraft along with the thin, cold air. To Lanza the stench of the burnt kerosene was perfume. He smiled broadly.

If there was going to be any substantial error on the bombing run, it was going to be along the axis of flight. Lanza played with his controls, hand and foot both, and brought the throttle down to reduce speed. A tone sounded in his headphones as he passed precisely through a checkpoint.

"Pilot to crew, five minutes. Stand by to roll."

"Chief to pilot, bomb crew standing by."

Lanza waited for another tone, the one that would tell him to begin the bombing run. It came quickly. He keyed his microphone again, saying, "Roll to the ramp."

He couldn't feel the bomb crew straining muscle to move the thing down the line to the ramp. He could and did feel the vibration of the bomb itself as it rattled along horizontally, then the final kachunk as the crew eased it into the down-angled cradle that held it locked in position on the ramp itself. Lolita nosed upward slightly with the rearward weight shift and Lanza adjusted the controls, his left arm pushing on the yoke while that thumb played with the trim button to keep her level. Another tone. "Releasing." For a brief moment he felt overweight as the plane ballooned slightly, then weightless as it dropped. Lanza's right hand adjusted the throttle to increase speed. No sense in hanging around, after all. Despite intel, the enemy just might have something in the way of air defense. Besides, he had to get well out of the way of Anabelle, coming in close behind.

Lanza turned hard left, flipping his night vision goggles down and looking towards the ground. He didn't expect to see the bomb hit the target; there was too much cloud cover for that. But just seeing the flash was satisfying all on its own. Besides, he knew that all bombs were one hundred percent accurate. They never failed to hit the ground.

"I love my job," he said aloud, as the flash of the two-thousand pounder lit up the clouds around him.

Fadeel heard the aircraft overhead, but distantly, as if they were a noise coming from another room. He didn't hear the whistle of the bombs until after the first explosion.

"What the…?" he asked aloud from his perch on the trembling minaret. Why would the crusaders drop the bridges?

Hastily, he descended from the minaret to where a few of his subordinates waited below. "Go to the bridges. Investigate."

Fadeel wasn't worried. What matter if they take out the bridges, he thought. The worst it means is that we get no more resupply by that route. The Kosmos will find another.

"X-ray Juliet, this is Lolita. Request bomb damage assessment on the bridges."

"One's down, one's still standing," Jimenez answered. "The northern bridge is the one down. Repeat on the southern."

"Wilco, X-ray Juliet. Lolita, out."

This time, both Lolita and Anabelle dropped. The southern bridge went down.

" Lolita this is X-ray Juliet. Both bridges are down. Go to your secondary targets."

"Roger, X-ray Juliet. Heading for food warehouse number one now. Note, X-ray, we've got two more birds inbound. The warehouses are priority targets for them."

"Roger," Jimenez answered. "So long as the food is destroyed, out."

The messenger stopped at the base of the minaret and gasped out, " Sayidi, they're going after the food stockpiles."

Fadeel's eyes went wide. What was wrong with these crusaders? Didn't they understand that the entire world would condemn them for destroying food? Didn't they care?

"By Allah," he whispered, a measure of truth finally dawning on him, "what will we do if the crusaders stop caring about their image among their undeclared enemies?"

Pumbadeta, Sumer, 2/7/462 AC

"Tighter than a houri's hole," Sada announced triumphantly, when Carrera emerged from the IM-71 helicopter that had carried him down to the landing zone west of the city where he planned to make his command post.

"It's cut off," Jimenez agreed. "So far, there's been no reaction. I mean, I expected something by now. A probe… some mortar fire… maybe a little sniping. But… nothing."

"I don't think they contemplated the possibility of being actually besieged," Carrera said. "If you look at it from their point of view, they had no worries. They had absolute political control of the town; their logistics were being handled by the Kosmos; and the FSC's coalition was obviously unwilling to risk the casualties."

"Big mistake on their part," Sada said. "Speaking of the Kosmos, Patricio, there's a representative of GraceCorps that wants to speak to you, a Ms. Lindemann. They've got a column of trucks loaded with food that we stopped."

"Fine. I expected that, or something like that, anyway. I'll speak with her."

Sada pointed at a long line of tractor-trailers, led by a whitepainted sedan. "She's over there."

Carrera didn't consider GraceCorps to be the enemy. Did he think they were stupid? Absolutely. Misinformed? Generally. Inexact? Especially. Hopelessly optimistic? Of course. But they weren't the enemy. They did what they did, help the needy, and they did it rather better than most of their sort. They were among the few Kosmos of whom it could be said, in his opinion, that they were more interested in doing good than in doing well.

So he was polite, unusually so for him in his dealings with the Kosmos.

Smiling affably, he began, "Ms. Lindemann, how can I help you?"

She smiled as well. "You could begin, sir, by having your men let us through."

He shook his head, as if with regret. "No… no. I'm afraid that won't be possible. This town is besieged."

Lindemann didn't seem to understand. "What difference does that make?"

"It means we've cut off all access. If you have medicine that might be needed by the inhabitants, I can arrange an airdrop. The law of war requires that. But no food is going in and no people are coming out anytime soon."

"You can't do that!"

"Why?" Carrera's face seemed genuinely puzzled.

"Food's a human right," she answered. "Those people will starve."

"So?"

She opened her mouth again, as if to speak. No words came out.

Carrera reached into his pocket and pulled out a small sheaf of folded paper. This he handed over, saying, "This is the law of war as regards sieges. I intend to abide by it completely. Read it, then come back to me. Note that while the country that has sponsored us, Balboa, is a signatory to the Additional Protocols, neither my organization, nor our principles, the Federated States, are."

Lindemann was at least somewhat familiar with the laws of war. After all, her organization often came in on the tail end of humaninspired and created destruction.

"You're required to let out pregnant women, the very ill, and very young children," she said.

"Really? What a surprise," Carrera answered. Then he asked his own question. "When?"

Lindemann looked confused. "When?"

"Yes. When does the law of war say I must let them go? I'll save you the trouble. It doesn't."

"But the garrison may not feed them!" she countered.

"That'll be their doing, not mine," he answered.

At that time another series of explosions rocked the town. Even at this distance, several kilometers, Lindemann and Carrera were rocked by the blasts.

"What was that?" she asked.

"We're destroying the food stocks in the town," he answered, calmly. "This is a siege, Ms. Lindemann, not a game. This is war, not a boxing match. Now, you can take your trucks back, or you can sit here, or you can do whatever you like… except resupply that city. That you will not be permitted to do."

"What about when the people try to escape? You know they will."

"Then, Ms. Lindemann, we will do what the law of war permits. Besides, before they get out they'll have to clear mines. They're not really equipped for that. We won't let them, anyway."

"You are going to let them out at some point, aren't you, Patricio?" Jimenez asked.

"'Course I am, Xavier. I can't tell you when, exactly. I'll let the Kosmos beg, and chide and nag for ten days or maybe a couple of weeks. Then, I'll exact some concessions from them. I'm still thinking about what concessions I'll want. Maybe we'll make them grovel and thank us for abiding so completely by the law of war. Maybe we'll just make them feed us first. Maybe both and maybe more.

"After that, we'll drop some leaflets and let the pregnant women and the sick out. Then the Kosmos can care for them a few miles downstream."

Pumbadeta, Sumer, 9/7/462 AC

The leaflets fell from the sky-specifically, they were dropped by Crickets-before sunrise. On one side they showed pictures and diagrams of who would be allowed out and where. The pictures showed one woman with a large belly, a man on a stretcher, and a very small child. The diagram was simply the place where Highway 1 met the encircling berms and minefields. More complex instructions were written on the back. Most of Pumbadeta's adult residents, male and even female, could read.

Fadeel was mixed about the prospect. Food was already scarce; this would reduce the number of mouths he had to feed. On the other hand, he was counting on the presence of large numbers of noncombatants, when the assault finally came, to sully the reputation of the coalition. Then he remembered:

This part of the coalition doesn't care a goat's ass for their reputation with the humanitarians. They'll kill without compunction. Better, then, to let go whoever will be allowed out, to stretch out the food that remains.

Three hundred thousand people, give or take, had been trapped when the siege fell on the city like a thunderclap. Of those, perhaps five or six thousand were truly sick. An additional ten or eleven thousand women may have been pregnant or nursing. And there were many small children.

Nothing like that number came out. Nursing women would be allowed to leave, but what if they had children over the age of six, which was Carrera's stated cut off? Would they leave those behind? For the most part, they would not. What about women with children who would be allowed out as well as children who would not be? They tended to stay behind as well. And the sick? If they were truly ill, they needed to be carried. Stretcher bearers from the legion were standing by to take their litters. Few men inside the town were willing to bear them to the demarcation berm.

In all, perhaps five thousand, or a few more, of the citizens of the town actually left. Then the wall closed down again.

As that wall closed, Fernandez and his people, supplemented by Sada's, descended on the refugees, pumping them, without violence, for any information they might have on the defenses and the defenders. Most knew little. A few were better informed.

"Why so few sick?" Lindemann asked. When Carrera explained, she volunteered, on behalf of herself and her workers, to go in and carry the deathly ill out.

"No… you would just be held and become hostages," he answered, feeling a measure of grudging admiration. "They get out on their own, or with the help of those inside, or they stay there. I'm still willing to airdrop medicine, remember."

"What good is medicine without doctors to administer it?" she asked.

"Not my concern. But if you can talk Mustafa into letting Doctor Nur al-Deen-he's the enemy's overall number two, you know?- jump in by parachute, I'll be glad to let him do so. Course, I'll hang the bastard right after we take the town."

Pumbadeta, Sumer, 11/7/462 AC

The air defense maniple that loosely ringed the city was useful only for low flying aircraft. For any that flew higher Carrera had Turbo- Finches armed with machine gun pods. These, with a top speed of only about two hundred and fifty miles per hour, were extremely poor interdiction aircraft.

On the other hand, the Castilla-built Hacienda-121 was a very good light cargo aircraft, but its top speed was only two hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. Thus, when the pilot of the circling TurboFinch saw the Hacienda kicking bundles out the door, he had little trouble closing the distance and investigating. The Hacienda was decorated with a Red Crescent, sign of the Islamic version of the Red Cross. The serial numbers on the side of the Hacienda indicated Yithrabi registration.

Since he was weapons free, meaning he could engage any aircraft that fit his rules of engagement, and since he was expressly instructed not to permit any airdrops or aerial deliveries into the town without prior authorization, he armed his gun pods. If he worried even in the slightest about his commander's reaction to his shooting down a civilian aircraft he had only to remember that this was the third anniversary of a very important date to that commander.

It was unlikely that Carrera would mind, today, if he dropped a nuke.

Before shooting, though, the Finch pilot tried to warn the Hacienda off with a burst that flew parallel to the cargo plane. The plane shuddered, as if the pilot were surprised, but quickly got back on course. It was as if the Hacienda pilot simply couldn't believe that anyone would violate the rules the Kosmos had set up to protect just such activities. At that point, the Finch pilot shifted slightly to line his guns up, and opened fire with a short burst of several hundred rounds. Perhaps a third of these impacted the Hacienda, which heeled over to one side and began a rapid smoking descent to the ground.

And that was the last attempt at aerial resupply of the town by any Kosmo organization.

"Don't you have any sense of humanity?" Lindemann asked, furious and in tears.

Carrera thought about that for a few seconds before answering, "As you would define it? Perhaps not. Am I supposed to? If so, why?"

Fadeel was shocked, shocked at seeing the Hacienda go down in flames. He'd never believed any of his enemies would have the sheer… the sheer…

They're as ruthless as I am. And much better armed. I'd better figure a way out of here for myself and my key subordinates or I'm screwed.

The sun had set several hours prior, leaving three spark-bright moons to shine onto the planet. They would set about midnight. In those hours, Fadeel had massed just over three hundred of his mujahadin and a thousand unarmed civilians in buildings on the north side of town, at a place where the ground was a bit rougher and where a man, once free of the encirclement, might have a chance to escape. He told his followers that this was a raid with the purpose of getting into the besiegers' rear area and ruining their supply arrangements. Liberally doped with hashish as many of those followers were, there had been no questions.

Ordinarily, Fadeel would have waited until perhaps three in the morning to launch his raid. That would be the time when the enemy would be at his lowest level of alert. Unfortunately, that would also not give him enough darkness before sunrise to effect his escape. The attack would be at midnight.

The legion had purchased two NA-23s for the express purpose of converting them to aerial gunships. Eventually, there would be four in a deployed legion, twenty total for the entire force, but for now, two would have to do. These were just enough, with maintenance schedules, to keep one on station throughout the night, most nights. Instead of "NA," these birds bore the designation "ANA"; "A" for Attack.

Out the left-hand side of each of the planes stuck the muzzles of five tri-barrel fifty caliber machine guns. These were chain guns, driven by electric motors to very high rates of fire, eighteen hundred rounds per minute, per gun. Between the five of them, the planes could spit out nine thousand rounds in just sixty seconds. The guns were carefully aligned so that number three, in the center of the lefthand side, fired to the center of the beaten zone, number one fired high, number five low, and two and four in between. The guns were somewhat loosely mounted as a certain amount of spread was deemed desirable.

Modifying the planes had not been particularly cheap. It had seemed worthwhile, therefore, to give each a fairly sophisticated suite of sensors, especially low light television and thermal imagers. The thermals alone were an appreciable percentage of the cost of the final system.

The price had been worth it. Alerted of the assembling enemy by the ever-roaming RPVs, the one ANA-23 on station was waiting when the mujahadin and the civilians emerged from their cover.

The gunner for the plane tapped his monitor to mark one edge of the enemy formation. He then tapped the perceived center of mass, and then the other end of the group. A computer registered the taps and calculated a flight path and attitude for optimal dispersion of fire. This was fed to the pilot's console automatically. The pilot aligned his plane on the calculated path, heeled over and began his firing run.

Fadeel's men crept forward, driving the civilians before them, toward the enemy-held berm that surrounded the town. He and his select followers waited in the covering buildings for a path to be breached. Any minute now…

" Il hamdu l'illah! " Fadeel exclaimed when the eye-searing lines began to burn down from the heavens onto his men. "I never saw-"

He stopped speaking when the near horizon lit up with what appeared to be a moving wall of flame.

Not only had the RPV alerted the ANA-23, it had also alerted base, which had sent out two sorties of Turbo-Finches carrying incendiaries, plus rocket and machine gun pods. The Finches followed hard on the heels of gunship's tracers with the leftmost bird in the lead and the rightmost following in echelon.

The Finches opened up with rockets first. These sped downrange until their time fuses exploded them about twelve hundred meters from the insurgents. Each ship fired two pods of nineteen rockets. Each rocket further launched eleven hundred and seventy- nine, give or take, flechettes. Between the two planes, four pods, and seventy-six rockets a total of nearly ninety-thousand flechettes took flight.

As if the flechettes weren't enough, the pilots of the Finches armed their machine gun pods and fired several bursts each at whatever clusters of warm, or cooling, bodies were in their view. Then, as the planes neared the beaten area, they further armed and dropped the two incendiary canisters each carried slung under its wings on the hard points nearest the fuselage. These tumbled down, end over end, before reaching the ground and breaking open to spill their contents in long, licking tongues of flame.

After the gunship, then the flechettes, then the Finch's machine gun pods, there were relatively few insurgents or civilians in a position to notice the flame. Most of those who were screamed like girls as they burned.

"That is illegal, Illegal, ILLEGAL! " screamed Lindemann at Carrera.

"Nonsense," he answered, more amused by her anger than made angry himself.

"It is forbidden to use flame as a weapon!" she insisted.

"Still nonsense. What you apparently misread was the provision in the applicable convention on using incendiaries expressly to destroy cities and their civilian inhabitants. This was put in, perhaps even sensibly, to try to prevent the kind of city burning that took place during the strategic bombing campaigns of the Great Global War. It has no applicability to tactical uses."

Near tears, for the screams had carried far, even over the roaring of the flames, she said, "But you didn't have to burn them alive."

Carrera shrugged. "Explosives would have damaged the minefields we laid to isolate the city. Flame does not."

He didn't add, Besides, you haven't seen the pictures of the little children these bastards murdered here and elsewhere. They deserved to burn alive.

Camp Balboa, 24/7/462 AC

"Not a single one left," the RPV pilot muttered. "Not a dog or a cat nor, so far as I can tell, even a rat left wandering. They must be getting mighty hungry in there."

This was not exactly time-sensitive information. The pilot merely made a note of it on his flight journal. He'd report it to intelligence as soon as his bird was safely home.

Carrera was back at base, leaving Jimenez in charge forward at the wall of circumvallation around Pumbadeta. The Marines had actually done splendidly in his ZOR, enough so that he wondered if he was perhaps unduly prejudiced by long service with the FS Army. Doing splendidly or not, though, it was worth coming back to check from time to time.

He was standing at a map board, analyzing it for serious incidents that had occurred in the last month as compared to the previous three. There had been a couple more roadside bombings than normal, a couple of suicide bombings more than usual, as well. But firefights were down. This he attributed to most of the enemy fighters being in Pumbadeta, safely-for certain values of safe-locked up.

A private working for the command post took some cigarette ash and a cloth to clean off a small portion of one chart labeled, "Dog and Cat Report." This was divided into days. Carrera noticed that the number had been steadily dropping for a week. Now, the private marked in "0."

Not a single dog or cat to be seen from the air with thermals, he thought. They have got to be getting very hungry, indeed. Oh, sure, there are probably a number left. But if so, it's because people are keeping them indoors, either for safety from foragers or to eat themselves.

We'll give them a couple more days and let all the woman and smaller children out. Better tell the MPs to shift some women to do visual inspection and physical search of the Sumeris. Maybe Sada can help there, too.

Pumbadeta, Sumer, 27/7/462 AC

If one thing marked the throng of people leaving the town it was tears. For some, even many, these were tears of relief. For others they were tears of pain from hunger, disease, or even thirst.

The night before leaflets had been dropped advising the civilians that it was time for the women and children under twelve to leave. No men or boys over twelve would be allowed out, the leaflets said.

This time there were nearly two hundred thousand that took the exit being offered. Each of them was sure the insurgents would never have let any of them go unless the food were almost completely gone. But it was either feed the families, or let them go, or face an insurrection by the one hundred thousand men who were in the town and were not necessarily with the insurgents. Since most of those men were armed…

The line was thick and long and very, very slow. Each family group had to descend into one or another of the pits that had been dug by the access points. The pits had long, gradually sloping ramps. Cloth barriers divided them into two, one for boys and the other for women, babies, and girls. Armed men oversaw each, prudery be damned. On a few occasions rifle fire split the air as men were identified trying to escape under burkas. On one occasion fire was opened when it was revealed that a young woman was wearing a suicide vest under hers.

GraceCorps was there but was not in control. As the families exited the pits they were interviewed by Sada's people, then photographed. The photographs did two things. One was to provide identity cards that the people were told must be kept on their persons and displayed at all times. The other, less obvious reason, was that the machines used to make the photographs also scanned in the facial features, entering them into a data base that could be used by a new technique-new to Terra Nova, in any case-Face Recognition Technology. This measured certain factors that could not be easily disguised by such things as beards, distance and angle from corners of eyes to nose, for example. A face entered into an FRT database could be reliably picked out, even from a crowd, until its wearer went to a talented plastic surgeon.

From the ID Card/FRT stations the families went to medical clearing points. This also had two purposes. On the one hand, the legion wanted to avoid the spread of disease and even had an interest, minor to be sure, in preventing loss of innocent life. Thus inoculations were given. On the other, it was a way of getting a DNA sample from everyone in the town.

Senior women from each group were then sequestered from their families and from each other. While their families went to one of the forty small and fairly comfortable tent cities being run now by GraceCorps, the senior women had to stay behind to identify other groups and individuals and vouch that they came from the neighborhoods they said they did, the ones that were shown on their ID cards. In case of doubts, the new families were shown to much less civil camps run by Carrera's MP and Civil Affairs maniples. In case of demonstrating a pattern of not telling the truth, the senior women were themselves shown to the relatively unpleasant military-run camps.

It took four days to run the people through the various checkpoints. The last two days, it was probably fair to say that the refugees were beginning to approach starvation. On the other hand, few of them died.

There was also one smaller camp outside the walls around the city. This was full of a group of Kosmos who had come to protest the siege. It was very unpleasant, the diet consisting entirely of bread and water for the thirty-seven odd days of their confinement.

Interlude

29/4/69 AC, Cochea, Balboa

And so it is over, they say, thought Belisario Carrera, sitting on the front porch of his small house and looking at the dormant volcano to the east. Will it ever really be over, though?

It had been a long war for Belisario, a man who had never thought to have found himself in a war, let alone leading the band that had struck terror into the forces of Earth from past San Jose colony to the northern half of Santander.

Twenty-five years of war, he mused tiredly. Thank God it's ended for now, at least. I am old, too old to have gone on much longer.

It hadn't just been a long war, it had been a hard one. The small family graveyard not far from the porch held the bodies of a dozen of Belisario's sons, sons-in-law, and grandsons, fallen in action, along with some of the women and girls killed by Earth's retaliatory random terror bombing. Sometimes there was no body, or only a part of one, beneath a marker. Yet all were remembered, all missed, all grieved for.

It was possible that no one on the New World had given as much of his blood as had Belisario in the cause of freedom.

He'd never really been a "general," he knew, no matter what his followers had called him. Indeed, his "army" had never numbered more than about five hundred, and usually much less. Their arms had been a motley collection of homemade and primitive supplemented with captures, here and there, from the UN Marines. Some of his men had been UN Marines who had deserted with their arms. One of his daughters-in-law-a tall, slender and beautiful Zulu girl-was one such. He thought that perhaps those desertions, and they had become increasingly common as the war dragged on, had had more to do with Earth's throwing in the towel than whatever success he and the other bands across Terra Nova had had in the field.

Idly, Belisario wondered how it might have been if he'd been a real general, not a mere horse rancher and farmer operating off instinct. Perhaps more of his sons and grandsons might have lived, he thought. Then again, they had the trained generals and they lost. So perhaps it was as well I had only instincts.

In his mind's eye, Belisario saw a montage of scenes: his horsemen slipping through the jungle flats, the burning buildings and the smoke of Earth's aircraft in the distance. In his memory he heard the high-pitched shriek of UN attack aircraft strafing his columns, the screams of the wounded and the exultant shouts of victory.

The last was best remembered, bringing to his face a smile. That face was still smiling when his wife found him, cold and stiffening, on the front porch.

Chapter Thirty-Two Whosoever saveth the life of one, it shall be as though he had saved all mankind. -The Koran, Sura V

Pumbadeta, Sumer, 34/7/462 AC

Fadeel had expected the assault by the crusader mercenaries to begin as soon as the last of the women and children had been evacuated. He'd expected wrong. Instead, the blockade continued, with the pitiful food stocks running lower and lower. His men were already on quarter rations. The civilian men of the city got nothing.

Which is a problem, as Fadeel unhesitatingly admitted to himself. They're getting no food, except for whatever they may have hoarded, but they still have guns. And the

second I try to take the guns, I'll have a full scale revolt on my hands. Besides, if the crusaders couldn't get the Sumeris to surrender their weapons, what chance have I?

Hmmm. I wonder if I can't use them to my purposes before they become dangerous to me. Hmmm.

35/7/462 AC

It was no real problem for Fadeel's twenty-seven hundred remaining committed fighters to round up several hundred boys between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. They simply tooled through the streets on their SUVs, grabbing whomever they chanced upon that was unarmed. Moreover, given that the insurgents already had perhaps twenty thousand small arms in the city, together with millions of rounds of ammunition, arming the boys, once conscripted, was even easier.

Dawud ibn Haroun, aged fourteen and scrawny even in good times, searched fruitlessly through a garbage can in an alley. An orphan about whom no one had cared since he was a baby, Dawud was perhaps better placed to survive amidst the siege-induced starvation than most of the city's people. Even so…

Even so, it's a frightful thing, indeed, when even the garbage cans are empty.

His head was stuck in a dumpster, legs and feet trailing to the ground, when Dawud heard, "Hey, boy? You looking for something to eat?"

Overcoming his first instinct, which was to run, Dawud eased himself out of the dumpster and turned to face the voice. He saw an SUV, unevenly painted, as if with a can of spray paint, a sort of dun color, and containing three armed men. One of the men, presumably the one who had spoken, held his hand out, palm down, and jerked his fingers to the hand's heel in the Arab method of beckoning.

"Come with us," said the one who seemed to be the leader. "We'll feed you. Once anyway."

Seeing little option, Dawud climbed into the SUV, which sped off. It stopped twice more, once to summon another street urchin little different from Dawud and once simply to grab and carry off an older boy who refused to enter the auto.

Briefly, Dawud wondered if the number of boys taken corresponded to the number of fighters in the car. It was not impossible. Then again, he'd been through that, too, in his short and unpleasant life. He'd survived it once; he could again.

But no, the men hadn't taken the boys for fun and games. Moreover, true to their word, they had taken them to a large warehouse on the edge of town and fed them. Perhaps the food had been less than ideal, the meat scanty and the rice undercooked, but it had still been more than Dawud had seen in one place in weeks.

Food was followed by a lecture from a mullah, the lecture mostly concerning the iniquity of the besiegers, the duty of all Moslems to fight in the jihad, and the rewards of paradise. Dawud was no dummy and absolutely didn't like the direction in which the sermon was plainly going.

He liked it even less when the fighters had begun passing out arms and ammunition, and explaining, briefly, how to load, aim-more or less-and fire the things. The insurgents had the boys practice dry firing a few times before they led them off, by various routes, with two insurgents to each group of ten boys to ensure there would be no "desertions."

The last thing the fighters had done was explain the boys' mission. "Better for you to keep going in the attack," they'd added. "We'll support you in that. But death at the end of a rope awaits any so cowardly as to turn around from their duty."

A sound eerie to Balboan ears poured across the desert floor. It was a muezzin calling over loudspeakers.

Jimenez looked out over the dry and barren desolation that stretched from the circumvallating berm to the edge of the city. There was one almost full moon tonight, Hecate, plus partial luminescence from another, Bellona. Thus, even without using his night vision goggles, he could see easily across the open expanse.

Oh, oh, he thought as the first armed combatants stepped out into the light and began to walk forward.

"Engage now, sir?" asked the platoon centurion lying next to Jimenez on the friendly side of the berm. He had seen them too.

"No… no, wait until they hit the leading edge of the minefield. Any we can draw out and kill are that many fewer we'll have to fight when we finally assault the town."

The speakers on one of the near minarets crackled to life as the boys emerged from their shelters on the edge of town. A muezzin began reciting from the Koran over the speakers, his recital focused on the path of holy war.

One boy-Dawud thought it was the last one who had been taken in the vehicle that had brought him in-lay down in dirt, apparently taking cover. Dawud paused briefly, his eyes glancing over to look down at the boy. He began moving forward again almost instantly as a burst of automatic fire coming from behind impacted the slacker, causing blood to spurt from the body as it caused little geysers of dust to spurt from the ground.

From the speakers the muezzin decreed that death was to be the lot of slackers and cowards.

"This feels dirty as shit, sir," the centurion told Jimenez as the mob flowed closer.

I'm trying to remember the last clean war there was, Jimenez thought to himself. To the centurion he said, "Nothing for it but to get it over with then. But give them a couple more minutes. Until we can be sure none are going to be able to escape."

Jimenez slid down the berm's embankment and gestured for his radio telephone operator to hand over the microphone. With the radio, he called the command post to ask if there were a gunship overhead. Informed that there was not but that one would be overhead within ten minutes, he cursed and began the crawl back up to the berm's edge. His RTO followed.

"Do you have a forward observer attached?" he asked the centurion.

"Yes, sir. Shall I get him?"

"Please. Immediately."

Dawud's young heart pounded in his chest as the men following began to shout, " Allahu akbar, CHARRRGE!" while firing their weapons from behind the boys and forward, over their heads. The shouting grew more distant the farther Dawud's legs carried him.

In his brief course of instruction the orphan had been taught to fire the rifle once each time his left leg hit the ground. He began to do so, keeping the rifle generally pointed to the north. Each burst took him a little by surprise. He found the sensation of recoil both unpleasant and frightening. He found the thought of being shot in the back by the men he assumed were still following to be more so.

There was an explosion ahead, somewhere to Dawud's right front. When he looked at the flash it was just in time to see three bodies flying through the air before hitting the ground. At the same time, two sets of bright shining lines were drawn across the front, one coming from the east and one from the west. Not only didn't Dawud know these were tracers, he was far too ignorant of matters military to realize that one tracer also meant another four bullets. He also didn't know enough to identify the explosion as having come from a land mine.