Carnifex

The Base

Carrera's Cricket jostled to a rough landing not far from where four crosses still stood. The pilot had a time of it avoiding the mass of vehicles still standing there, some of them burning and smoking, and which had brought in the Scouts. The ground leading from the vehicles was littered with corpses.

Carrera sighed, looking at the crosses. They really did it. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. He got on the radio and made a call back to Camp San Lorenzo with a demand for his engineers to make something for him, a lot of somethings, as a matter of fact. Then he exited the aircraft and walked to stand at the base of one of the crosses. This one held the cold, blackened body of a young signifer he had personally commissioned not long before. I promise you, son, they'll pay with interest.

A half squad of Pashtun Scouts ran up, their naik looking at Carrera so much as if to ask, Are you insane, Duque? This area is not secure.

As if to punctuate, an almost spent bullet whined in, kicking up dust near Carrera's feet. He ignored it.

"Naik, can you lead me up to Jimenez?"

"Yes, sir," the Pashtun answered. "He and the subadar sent us. This way please."

"And leave a couple of men to guard my Cricket."

"Yes, sir."

Escorted by his two radiomen, these having pulled the radios out from the Cricket and slung them on their backs, and three of the naik's scouts, Carrera began to mount the steep-sided hill to his front.

* * *

The way was steep in places. Robinson nearly fell at several points. Torches were an impossibility, the air was barely enough to sustain life. Fortunately, the Salafis had a fair number of chemical light sticks to illuminate the way. Still, the point light sources were few enough that many tripped on loose rocks and slipped on the damp tunnel floor.

The people in the tunnel amounted to perhaps just over five hundred mujahadin, Mustafa's most faithful, a party of them taking turns carrying the litter on which rested the one nuclear weapon they had salvaged. There were also many times that in women and children. These last were not only those who belonged to the core of the faithful, but as many others from those staying behind as could be gathered before the tunnel behind them was deliberately collapsed.

Children cried continuously, the tunnel walls echoing with the annoying sound. This was particularly hard on High Admiral Robinson. His class rarely saw children but for grubby prole brats begging by the side of Old Earth's streets and roads. Their own progeny, few as they were, were invariably given over to lower caste governesses to care for.

"Can't you quiet your brats?" Robinson demanded. Arbeit seconded that.

"We could more easily quiet you," Nur al-Deen answered over his shoulder. "That; or have you wailing a lot more than the children." The High Admiral immediately shut up; possession of the nuke keys might, after all, not be enough to save his life. The Salafis were frequently irrational.

* * *

The southern, eastern and western "walls" of the enemy fortress were cleared. Still, the Legion and its auxiliaries were shut out from entering the caves and tunnels. The fire from the defenders inside keeping them out was not less than the fire of the attackers outside pinning the Salafis in.

The call had gone out for flammables over and above the flamethrowers carried by the Legion's sappers. These had seen their fuel exhausted before the defenders had been much discomforted, so deep were the excavations. Fuel, however, would not be forthcoming for hours.

Some deep excavations could be reached as they were isolated from the central tunnel and cave system. One of these, the largest, contained a UE shuttle, somewhat shot up, and eleven nukes.

Well, there's my excuse, Carrera thought, looking at the shuttle. But do I want to give them all up? I don't think so. The Volgan weapons almost certainly didn't come in officially but from criminal channels. Those I can keep. The Hangkuk warheads are unlikely to come to light. I can keep those, too. But I have to produce at least one and if I produce one Kashmiri bomb the subsequent investigation is going to show at least three more missing. Best to turn over one Hangkuk bomb and keep the other two. Then, if I use a Kashmiri bomb someday the evidence will point at them. That might be useful. And best to send the one I brought myself back to base.

The IM-71 which had brought that bomb waited outside the cave, rotor still turning, while Carrera inspected. A warrant officer from Fernandez's section had dismounted and accompanied Carrera on his inspection.

"I want those taken back, except that one," Carrera said, pointing out one of the Hangkuk bombs. "Have your people start loading them now and get out of here as soon as you're ready."

He considered further. I'd love to take this shuttle back and strip it down for reverse engineering. Then, too, I don't have a lot of interest in a UEPF-FSC war . . . for now. And, if the Feds are given this, they just might go to war, given the nukes. Hmmm . . . an IM-62 could lift it, I think. There's no way the shuttle weighs more than twenty tons. We could disassemble it here and ship it home inside a plane . . . if an IM-62 can lift it so can an NA-21. Yes.

"Drag out the shuttle, too. In pieces. We'll send it home," he finished.

* * *

Oh, Mama, I want to go home, Cruz thought as he and his lead squad eased their way further into the depths of the massif.

He broke and shook an infrared chemlight, tossing it around a corner. A grenade would have been as dangerous to him and his legionaries as to any Salafis who might be sheltering behind the corner.

The light was invisible to the naked eye. It lit up like day for the IR-sensitive monocular Cruz wore on his helmet. He flipped this down and, gulping, heart thumping in his chest, crouched low and pointed his F-26 around the corner's edge.

There were people there. Rather, there were a number of desiccated corpses laying on the tunnel floor and sitting with backs against walls. Cruz felt an involuntary shudder. Bad as they are, this was a shitty way to die.

Radio was useless down here, they'd discovered. Instead, the clearing teams laid out wire behind them, connecting their operations with the surface by field telephone. Cruz whispered his report into the phone before handing it over to his RTO.

Partly for grip and partly for silence the party imitated the generally barefoot Salafis. It felt decidedly odd to the legionaries but it did, they admitted, make a certain sense. At least one soldier asked his squad leader, "Sarge . . . if I'm killed, will you make sure they put my boots on me before they send me home."

The sergeant slapped the legionary's helmet and told him to, "Shut the fuck up, you morbid bastard."

Cruz scanned the tunnel floor ahead with his monocular. Nothing there to stick into feet, he decided. "Come on," he whispered, leading his men forward along one wall.

Midway to the next twist of the tunnel Cruz stopped to pick up the IR chemlight. There were a limited number, and there was no sense in wasting one. Instead of tossing it again, he had a better idea. He stuck it in the muzzle of the rifle of one of his men and had the soldier stick the rifle out. Then, as he had before, Cruz got low and peeked around the corner.

This time the bodies at the far end were living and apparently ready to fight. Taking a deep breath, Cruz turned and walked slowly and carefully back several men. By the sniff he could tell when he had reached the right one, despite the darkness.

"Go back fifty meters," he whispered to each of the soldiers he passed until he smelt the gas. "Undo your hose here and go to the point," he told that soldier.

"Sure, Centurion," the legionary answered.

The tunnel floor sloped downward. At the juncture the soldier eased his hose out and tipped a heavy, twenty liter, can of gasoline he carried. The gas left the can, trickled through the hose and began to flow down the sloping floor of the tunnel. The evaporating fuel was choking. Sounds of panic roared up the tunnel as Cruz bent to apply his cigarette lighter to the fluid.

"Back to air!" he shouted as the flames took hold, sucking the oxygen out of the local atmosphere.

* * *

"They'll go where? Carrera shouted into the microphone.

"One of the local underground aqueducts, the karez," Fernandez's voice answered. "And the system is thick up there. No telling which one they'll have used. Assuming the girl is right, of course."

Deep down Carrera knew she was right. Fuck, fuck, fuck. They can't get away.

* * *

Although it was only a few miles to the karez, it took more than ten miserable hours to negotiate it. In the cramped confines of the tunnel every stumble created a blockage. The air became foul and fetid. While the warmth of the bodies did cause a bit of air to rise, sucking fresh air in from the karez ahead, and displacing some of the heavy carbon dioxide down, it was barely enough to sustain life. The children too grown to be carried suffered especially. Some stopped suffering in time and were left behind. Their little bodies on the floor added to the difficulty of the journey for the others. To Robinson's discomfort, the crying didn't decrease with the dead children. Instead it increased exponentially with the wails of bereaved mothers and as the suffering of the other kids grew.

* * *

The trickle of dead and wounded out the various cave and tunnel mouths never seemed to end. Only a few of these were Salafi. In the close confines of the tunnels the legionaries rarely were willing to take a chance.

Above, in the ad hoc command post, a computer graphics man constructed a diagram of the interior from the reports of the grunts fighting below. Looking over the man's shoulder as he rotated the diagram on the screen, Carrera was amazed.

"Jesus, they must have been building this thing for thirty years, wouldn't you say, Subadar Masood?"

Masood, who had been walking up behind Carrera very quietly, snapped his fingers. It was impossible, so far as he could tell, to sneak up on his Duque.

"At least thirty years," he answered, "to my own certain knowledge."

At that moment an IM-71 carrying wounded lifted off from the valley floor and rotored out, heading south.

"I wish to hell I had some kind of gas that would seep down and clear the bastards out without losing any more of my men," Carrera said. "Carbon dioxide would do, if we had a way to manufacture it. Chlorine would do even better but that's against the rules."

Masood shook his head in the negative. "Wouldn't work, Legate. There are all kinds of baffles and twists down there. And then how would you get rid of the gas, even if it worked, to search?"

"Probably couldn't," Carrera admitted. Looking at the 3D diagram on the monitor screen, he said, "May not matter anyway. It appears to be mostly cleared."

He looked toward the crew manning the telephones. "You are keeping the men below informed, right?"

"Affirmative, Duque."

* * *

"Wait," Cruz whispered, holding up one hand to halt the second of the thirty-nine remaining men of his platoon. There was a shuffling and jangling from behind him as the men ran into each other.

"What is it, Centurion?" his optio asked.

"I heard something ahead."

"This fucking place is spooky."

"No shit."

The sound from ahead died out at the same time Cruz's men managed to quiet down. There was no need for him to tell them to fix bayonets. They'd learned early on that firing a rifle in these close confines was nearly as painful as being shot. Most of the clearing had been done with flame, rifle butt and bayonet.

"Cruz, that you?" rang out in Spanish from up ahead.

The thudding hearts slowed immediately as men exhaled with relief. If there had been anything more terrifying than closing to bayonet range in these infernal caverns the men couldn't imagine what it was.

"Yeah . . . yeah. Dominguez?"

"Oh, Cazador compadre!" came the laughing answer.

Cruz felt the fear drain away. "Christ, 'Minguez, you scared the shit out of me."

"Tell you what, Cruz; you clean my drawers and I'll clean yours and we'll see who has the hardest job," Dominguez answered as he strode forward. "Hey, what the fuck is this?"

In the IR, using only his monocular, Cruz didn't understand at first. He pulled out one non-IR chemlight and, ordering his men to shut one eye, broke and shook it.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed, looking into what appeared to be a very shallow tunnel with many large boulders blocking it a few feet in. "You don't suppose . . . "

"Buck it up to higher." In this case Dominguez meant both higher in the chain of command and higher in elevation.

* * *

"They fucking what?" Carrera raged.

"It looks like they got away," Jimenez explained. "Whichever direction that tunnel goes in, and I'd be willing to bet it doglegs somewhere, they'll have gotten into the karez system and that's extensive enough they could be heading anywhere.

Carrera felt his heart sink and his energy drain away. All this, for nothing? All my men lost or crippled, for nothing? War for almost nine fucking years, for nothing? Why, God?

He sat down, right on the dirt and grass. Click.

Jimenez sat next to him. "Hey, we hurt the bastards," he tried to cheer.

"Not enough," Carrera answered distantly. "Never enough."

"Wonder who that is?"

Carrera looked up to see an FSA helicopter, sporting a red placard with three stars on it, winging in. "Rivers," he answered, "come to claim the nuke."

"The nuke?" Jimenez asked. "There were eleven of them."

Carrera answered, tiredly, "I know that. You know that. He doesn't. We're going to keep ten . . . just in case. They've already gone back to base."

"Dangerous game, Patricio. I know we have the seven but those were really unaccounted for."

"It'll be fine."

* * *

Rivers was escorted up the top of the massif by the same naik who had seen to Carrera earlier. Neither said a word.

Rivers didn't offer to shake hands; he was still furious at being maneuvered as he had been.

"So there really was a nuke."

Carrera nodded. "Yes. I was always certain there would be," he answered. "But their chiefs got away. All we managed to get here were a lot of indians."

"Well, intelligence will be interested in getting their hands even on just indians."

"No . . . that's not going to happen. We'll develop our own intelligence and share it with you," Carrera corrected. "Besides, there weren't very many indians taken, either."

Changing the subject, in large part because he knew that, if Carrera said he was not going to turn over any prisoners, then no prisoners would be turned over, period, Rivers asked, "How did the chiefs get away?"

"Tunnel. We had no clue before we hit this place but it apparently leads to the underground irrigation system here, the karez."

Rivers thought about that one. "You are planning on giving me the nuke, right?" Seeing Carrera's listless nod, he continued, "Well . . . just because you share all your intelligence with us"—Rivers didn't really believe that—"doesn't mean we share all our intelligence with you."

Carrera cocked his head to one side, raising an eyebrow.

"We might be able to tell where they are underground. Don't bother asking how, but we sometimes can."

Hmmm. He means what? Seismic? Maybe, but probably not. Ground penetrating radar? Too deep. Carbon dioxide emissions? No . . . that wouldn't work as CO2 sinks. Maybe . . .

"Thermal? From so far underground? Some of these karez are a thousand feet down."

"It might work," Rivers shrugged. "I'm promising only to try."