Carnifex

15/1/463 AC, Ninewa, Sumer

While Fadeel al Nizal had not given up every cell, every bank account, and every cache of arms of which he knew—not quite, not yet—even of those he had given up not all had been turned. This wasn't because they could not have been, but because there were better and worse ways of destroying them. Better said, sometimes one really could kill two birds with one stone. And if one could not only destroy a terrorist cell but at the same time destroy the mutual confidence and trust between those who blew up children in markets and those who called them "freedom fighters," so much the better.

* * *

Only one of Terra Nova's three moons, Bellona, shone down on the scene.

"Come! Hurry, hurry!" insisted the keffiyah-topped rifleman to the reporter come to interview his chief. "Into the van before you are seen. The enemy has eyes everywhere."

Silently, warily, the news team approached the van. They were three. The reporter, who seemed to be in charge, was a tall, swarthy sort who gave his name as "Montoya," and said he was from Castile, in Taurus. The cameraman said nothing beyond his name, "Cruz." The translator introduced himself only as "Khalid." All three had brown eyes. None were quite white, though the cameraman was much darker than the other two. They seemed to be in rather good physical shape as well. On his shoulder, the cameraman easily bore an unusually large camera which the translator said was a special model for direct transmission to the home station. All three wore the body armor that was de rigueur for nearly everyone in Sumer by this time.

As the news team reached the van they were each subject to a hasty but thorough search of their persons. Neither their cell phones, nor their armor, nor their large camera with its tripod incited any comment. With a nod from the searcher, their guide again said, "Hurry. Into the van."

Once inside, all three were blindfolded. "It's for your own good," their guide explained. "What you do not know you cannot be forced to reveal. And you know the enemy has horrible ways."

"Militaristic hyenas," said Montoya.

"Imperialist pigs," agreed Cruz.

"Infidel dogs," summed up Khalid.

With the news team blindfolded, the van sped off with no more wheel screeching than one would expect of any innocuous van in any major city in Sumer.

The drive was long, though it never left the city; the sounds of traffic told as much. After a period of time the van stopped. The news team could hear the driver open the door and get out. They heard what sounded like a garage door being opened by hand. The driver returned, closed his door, put the van into gear, and drove forward into blackness. Once the van stopped he killed the engine, once again got out, turned on a light, and closed the garage door behind him.

"You can take your blindfolds off now," said the guide.

"Have all the major chiefs come?" asked Montoya. Khalid, the translator, passed on the question.

"Only three," answered the guide, with a weary shrug. "You know how the streets are these days with the infidel swine. The others couldn't risk it."

"I understand," agreed Montoya. "Fascist beasts."

"Anti-progressive poltroons," added Cruz.

"Heretical blasphemers," finished Khalid.

"This way, friends," said the guide, more warmly, if still wearily. "The chiefs that have come are eager to see you."

"As we are them," said Montoya.

Clutching his rifle firmly, the guide led the team out of the garage and into a well lit, finished basement where three somber looking men awaited, each of them armed with pistols in high fashion shoulder holsters, with rifles at their feet, and with a guard each standing by. The guards' weapons were loaded and ready, though they, themselves, seemed calm enough.

* * *

There are a number of ways of feeding ammunition to a weapon. The simplest is, of course, by hand, one round at a time. More complex is to use a magazine or belt. Magazines come in several varieties, single stacked, double stacked, and rotary, for example. There are also somewhat rarer approaches, notably helical and cassette.

* * *

The guide made introductions. Ordinarily, this would have been done over food and drink. These were no ordinary times, however. It wasn't every day that the faithful were able to make a broadcast through a Tauran news network. Normally they had to settle for al Iskandaria. And there was no telling how quickly the infidels would be able to home in on the transmission. Best to be quick.

"Set up the camera, Cruz, quickly," Montoya ordered. "We must hurry; there is no telling what fresh atrocities the enemies of the people are planning."

"Yes, sir," answered the cameraman who went about doing just that, setting up the camera and fine tuning its angle of view. When finished, Cruz got behind the large camera and announced he was ready. By that time, two of the guards had taken position at the corners of the room behind the news team.

Meanwhile, Montoya hooked each of the three chiefs up with small microphones, then hooked himself up as well. As he did, unnoticed he pressed a small button. A radio signal immediately went out to the news team's backup. Then Montoya, himself, backed up to stand nearer the door.

Montoya looked at Khalid. Yes, he appeared ready, too.

Montoya smiled at the three Sumeri men at the table and announced, "Then, gentlemen, let us begin . . . now."

* * *

The really tricky part hadn't been ripping the guts out of a new camera, nor even getting a weapon inside. The bitch, the absolute bitch, had been getting enough ammunition, with a reliable enough feed and ejection mechanism, inside the camera. No stacked magazine would do, they didn't hold enough ammunition. A belt required too complex a mechanism in the inner weapon. Rotary was invariably too fat.

This was where the close relationship between the Legion and the some elements of the Volgan Republic came in. The latter had a new submachine gun, the Aurochs, which used a helical magazine containing sixty-four nine-millimeter rounds and which fired at a rate of just over seven hundred rounds per minute, ordinarily. The mechanism could be modified to spit out closer to twelve hundred, however. Moreover, it had been.

* * *

At the word "now" four things happened. Montoya and Khalid, whose real names were, in fact, Montoya and Khalid, pivoted and launched themselves at the guards stationed in the corner. At the same time, Cruz, whose real name was Cruz and who was really in charge, depressed a button on the handle of his "camera." The lens, which was a much thinner glass than it looked, immediately broke as a nine-millimeter bullet departed through it, followed quickly by another seven. All left the "camera" accompanied by great bursts of flame. Lastly, just as the first bullet left, a small panel in the side of the camera opened to allow a spent casing, followed by another seven, to depart.

The guard and guide standing behind the dignitaries were the first to go. With two quick bursts of eight to ten rounds each, these were slammed to wall and their bodies simply ruined. (The Legion tended to ignore the rule on frangible ammunition when dealing with its irregular adversaries.) After that, with the chiefs just coming out of their shock to reach for their own arms, Cruz simply held the firing button down and swept across the table until the Aurochs inside the camera clicked empty. The chiefs went down like ninepins.

Meanwhile, Montoya and Khalid struggled with the two guards at the corners. Neither really had any advantage. All four were young men, fit and strong and trained to fight. That didn't matter, however, as Cruz now had his pick of weapons. He retrieved one, made sure it was loaded, then went to stand beside Montoya.

"This is really going to sting, buddy," Cruz told the struggling Cazador.

"Fuckthatjustkillthemotherfucker!"

Bang.

"Sorry about this, Khalid," Cruz said, as he placed the muzzle against the last guard's head. Bang. Khalid, member of Adnan Sada's underground, revenge minded men recruited to fight terror with terror, winced as he was stung with muzzle blast and covered with flecks of bone, bits of brain, and a wash of blood.

Once the "camera" had expended its ammunition, there was no reason to keep it whole. Cruz flicked a latch, split it open, and withdrew three small hand grenades. If only old Martinez could see me now, he thought. There had been a time when hand grenades frightened Cruz. That time was long past. Just another tool.

Montoya and Khalid acquired arms the same way Cruz had, from the bodies. They were just loading them when the driver of the van burst into the room, shouting and firing his rifle into the ceiling. The driver lasted a very short time.

Montoya spoke into his microphone. "Mission accomplished. No back up necessary. We're leaving the same way we got here. We'll dump the van and walk home. Oh, and if you assholes think we're going to do this kind of fucking crazy shit again, then you're crazy."

They left Al Iskandaria and Tauran News Network calling cards on each of the bodies, each card bearing a hand written note, "In the future, watch where you plant your bombs and who you kill. Hamad al Thani was our brother."

Before they left, Cruz and Montoya wired the bodies of the chiefs with grenades and set the camera to arm in five minutes and explode as soon as anything disturbed its integral motion sensor. Since the Legion wasn't going to investigate, it seemed a safe bet for nailing a few more.

"Do you think they'll buy that it was a hit by the pressies?" Sergeant Montoya asked, as Khalid backed the van out of the garage. Khalid knew how to drive the madcap streets of Sumer better than did the two legionaries.

"They'll wonder, at least," answered Ricardo Cruz, Optio, Legion del Cid. "If we'd left by helicopter, if any kind of reinforcement had come by helicopter, or at all, then no, they'd know it was us. But as is?" He shrugged. "It looks enough like a private hit, a vendetta hit, to make them wonder and maybe chill press-terrorist brotherhood."

"Something must chill it," Khalid said.

Khalid was an odd case, though not so odd in relation to Adnan Sada's little corps of assassins. Initially, he'd been very much against the infidel invasion of Sumer, despite being a Druze rather than a Moslem (a fact he generally hid; Cruz and Montoya, for example, had no idea Khalid was a Druze and they'd been working together for quite a while). Yet he had seen just rule come to his home province for perhaps the very first time when one of his own people, Adnan Sada, had become governor. This had dampened his early enthusiasm for resistance. (For whatever their other faults and virtues, Druze tended to be fiercely loyal to their homelands, wherever those might be and whoever might be in charge, provided, at least, that the governments and people of those homelands did not threaten the Druze.)

It hadn't done any more than that, though, no more than to make him neutral. To turn him from neutral to committed partisan had taken the loss of much of his family. These victims—his mother, his little brother, the doe-eyed baby sister, Hurriyah, Khalid had doted on—had been butchered by a terrorist car bomb, a bomb that turned them into disassociated chunks of bloody meat as they shopped the local market. At that point, Khalid had been identified, sought out, offered the chance of revenge, and recruited.

His initial training had been sketchy, at best, his initial missions simple. But, with time, with the development of newer and better courses of instruction, above all with his demonstrated propensity for assassination, Khalid's training and skills had much improved. Tonight he wouldn't add any black ribbons to the family picture he kept at his home, one for each terrorist he slew. He hadn't actually killed anyone, this mission, and the ribbons were for personal kills, personal revenge.

The chief of the Legion del Cid, Patricio Carrera, didn't know Khalid, personally. If he had, he'd have instantly recognized a kindred spirit.

"Where to from here, Khalid?" Cruz asked. "Montoya and I are back to our tercios, me to the First and him to the Sixth, after this mission."

"I've got one more mission, then it's off to Balboa, actually," Khalid answered. "Balboa for an immersion course in English—English! Allah, your fucking Spanish was strange enough!—and then Volga for some advanced training. After that, I don't know."

"Lucky guy," said Montoya. Then, thinking, Yeah, Khalid's a wog, but he's a damned good man to have on your side, he added, "Hey, I've got a sister you might like . . . "