A Desert Called Peace

by Tom Kratman

  There was nothing on the walls but for three projection screens opposite Carrera and thirteen carved poles with bronze placards and topped by gilded or silvered, carved eagles.

  This is going to be an insufferable data dump, Carrera fumed. God, I hate meetings. Nothing to be done for it, though.

  "Let's get to it," he began. "Matthias, what do we have to work with?"

  The Sachsen cleared his throat and answered, "Not as much as I'd like. Ze most—und, Patricio, I mean ze most—I vas able to come up viz vas seven hundred fifty million. Vorse, you can't use all uff it. I leveraged you zo hard zat you simply must keep a reserve to cover any downturn in your family's fortunes . . . zay, eight perzent. You may be able to use zat, even to dip a little deeper later on, if ze economy improves, generally."

  Carrera had hoped for more but . . .

  "Fair enough, Matthias. Let's see the Table of Organization and Equipment you've come up with, Dan."

  All three projection screens lit up. The two on the flanks showed spreadsheets. The right one was budget, broken down by major element of expense: Pay, Subsistence, Operations, Major End Items, and the like. Some of those were further subdivided as, for example, Major End Items which showed separate entries for Small and Crew- served Arms, Aviation, Armor, Artillery, Transportation, Command and Control, Intelligence, Medical, Foreign Military Training Group, and so forth.

  The left screen was a detailed breakdown by rank and military occupational specialty, or MOS, for the entire force to include the rump that would be left behind to send support forward and train replacements.

  The center screen was a diagram marked "Brigade Table of Organization." Carrera knew it already, in general terms. After all, he'd been in everyone's shit for the last five weeks as they struggled through. The chart showed one unit, marked as a rectangle with a large X feeding to each corner and a smaller one above to show the size; namely, a brigade. The larger X indicated the type, infantry. Above that box and to the right was a number, "4997." This was the strength, not subdivided by rank, they'd agreed on.

  One line ran down from that box to touch another line that ran almost from one side of the screen to the other. Twelve short lines descended from that longer one to a series of boxes. These twelve boxes had other symbols inside. Four showed large X's for infantry, one marked with the X and oval symbol for mechanized infantry, and one with crossed arrows for special operations troops or "Cazadors." —the word meant basically the same thing as "Jaegers," "Chasseurs," or "Rangers." Still others were marked for Artillery (a single large dot representing a cannon ball), Combat Support ("CS"), Aviation (a propeller), Service Support (SSP), Headquarters (HQ), and Naval (an anchor). Numbers showing above these boxes ranged from "372" for the smallest unit, the Cazadors, to "578" for the largest, the Service Support people.

  Above each of that series of boxes were drawn two vertical lines, indicating that the units were "battalions."

  "Let's just call a fucking spade a spade, shall we?" Carrera said. "We're forming with the intention of hiring ourselves to the Federated States. That makes us mercenaries even though we may call ourselves 'auxiliaries.' Traditionally, mercenaries form 'legions.' Moreover, we're going to be about the same size as a traditional, Old Earth Roman legion. Additionally, if you subtract the aviation and naval groups, we have ten sub-units just as did the legions of ancient Rome. And while we're at it," he added, "note that the sizes of our battalions are a bit small to really be battalions. Call us a legion and them fucking cohorts. Or celibate cohorts, for that matter, I don't give a shit."

  A really good subordinate must sometimes read his leader's mind, even in fairly trivial matters. Carrera had hand picked some pretty good ones. He was unsurprised, therefore, when all traces of the word "Brigade" were instantly replaced with "Legion" and all references to "Battalion" became "Cohort."

  "It occurred to several of us, too, Pat," Kuralski explained.

  "No comment, General Abogado?" Carrera asked.

  "Your command and control is going to be stretched with twelve subunits reporting directly to headquarters," Abogado answered. "On the other hand, when I was commanding the old 391st Separate Brigade here I had one mech battalion, plus two infantry, one special forces, one combat support, one military police, an aviation, a service support, a jungle operations school, an attached infantry battalion attending the jungle school, an international school and a headquarters battalion all reporting to me, plus two full brigades of the Territorial Militia that would have deployed here in the event of war. So I think it's in the realm of the plausible, at least. Moreover, I didn't command the air force and naval commands here. Instead I had to coordinate. Command is easier."

  "Yeah, I'm not worried about that. Okay, if we can't afford it, it's a pipe dream. Let's talk money, Dan," Carrera said.

  Kuralski nodded. "The biggest element of expense is troop related: pay, subsistence, allowances, operations, training—which includes maintenance—and training ammunition, for the brigade, err, legion. It's based on paying forty percent of FSA scales, housing them in tents, feeding them at local costs for food . . ."

  Clinton, the supply man, piped in, "Sir, myself and the log officer checked local wholesale prices on that and matched them against FS Army ration schedules. No more than one hundred drachma per man, per month to feed the troops well."

  "Yes," Kuralski agreed, "but we don't know if that would be feeding them what they like. I suspect feeding a good local diet will be a little cheaper."

  "Enough cheaper to make a difference?" Carrera asked.

  "Not really. Might save a hundred D per man for the year. Not even half a million drachma, overall."

  "Okay, continue."

  "Ammunition and personal and crew-served arms are so tightly interwoven that we really need to talk about them together," Kuralski said. "And we never could come to an agreement among us as to which to go with. It makes a pretty whopping difference in cost, at one end, and battle performance on the other, with proficiency in the middle. The short version is that if you buy Volgan, you can afford a war gun, a training gun, and ammunition to the tune of fifty or sixty thousand rounds of training ammunition per man. If you buy Tauran or FS, you can afford one rifle and maybe four thousand rounds per man. Of course, the Volgan arms are simple, reliable, and none too accurate. The best compromise we could come up with was to buy Volgan and add three Draco sniper rifles to each section."

  "What's that save us over buying FS or Tauran with, say, fifteen thousand rounds per man?"

  "About nine million," Kuralski answered. "That's an estimate, we haven't worked out any deals yet."

  "Works. Do it: Volgan, if we can get them. Besides, they're more accurate than they get credit for if they're properly zeroed."

  "We can get them, surely. There are also a lot of Volgan equipment clones out there," Kuralski reminded, "so it's probably fairly safe to plan that way. And Sachsen is allegedly sitting on hundreds of thousands of unusually high quality Samsonov rifles and machine guns, too."

  He went on, "The next largest element of expense is aviation equipment. That isn't counting training on that equipment."

  "Dan and I have worked on that one together, mostly by e-mail and phone," Abogado interjected. "I don't know all that much about training for pilots and such, though I can deal with maintenance training well enough. Most of what he's talking about using is Volgan or really, really simple Tauran and FS birds. I think that, rather than set up an aviation subdivision of the FMTG, we ought to send pilots and maintenance personnel overseas. I've looked into the prices and, in the short term anyway, that would be cheaper . . . a little. Maybe later, once we've got enough local pilots trained and a larger scale organization, it might be worth it to bring the aviation training base home."

  Carrera looked over the screen showing cost factors. Aviation stood out above everything but personnel and training costs. The figure, "FSD 115,000,000," was a little shocking.

  "How do we save some money there?" he aske
d.

  "I don't think we can cut numbers, Pat," Dan answered. "What we have listed—eight converted crop dusters for attack birds, twelve medium and four heavy lift helicopters, eight cargo, six recon and twelve remote-piloted vehicles—is about the minimum to do the job. The basis was to be able to lift the critical elements of an infantry cohort and the Cazador cohort in two lifts, assuming an eighty-five percent serviceable rate for the transport helos. Almost everything else was based on that. Oh . . . and we'll need two more helicopters for medical evacuation. We can save something if you're willing to go with used, rebuilt helicopters and to substitute short takeoff recon birds for choppers for the medevac."

  "And save how much?"

  "About eighteen million. Note, here, that this is a bad bargain, unless you find more money at some point to buy newer aircraft. Older and cheaper also means sooner to wear out."

  "All right. Buy used. You have a line on used?"

  "For a lot of it, we do. For some we're still looking. IM-71 medium lift helicopters, for example, can be had for about one point six million FSD, each, used. IM-62 heavy lifters run about two point six. New they run over twice that, by the way. We've found nine IM-71s for sale. We're still looking for three. IM-62s are available."

  "Okay, let's talk armor."

  Kuralski laughed slightly. "If you think we fought over small arms, that was nothing compared to the fight over armor. If we thought you could afford it, we'd mutiny before letting you buy anything but Zion-built Chariots. Too damned expensive, even used. Sixty of those would cost two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty million. It would break the bank, in other words.

  "Instead, what you've got there under that sum of 'FSD 84,000,000' is our best guess of what it will cost for a mix of Volgan T-38s and PBM-23s. Until I can go over there—"

  "You?" Carrera asked.

  "I'm the only one who speaks Russian. Until I can go over there, that amount remains an educated guess. We do have fairly hard numbers and figures for some much less capable equipment, T-27s and the like. But that stuff is truly shit, well designed but what's available is so badly made it would be almost as criminal to use it as to not have anything."

  Carrera looked like he had a very sour taste in his mouth. He mulled the prospect of losing his chief of staff for anywhere from weeks to months and clearly didn't like it. After perhaps a minute of looking sour, he went along. "All right. You go to Saint Nicholasberg as soon as possible to hunt arms. Moving right along, who do we have among the Civil Force competent to command the mechanized troops?"

  Kuralski shook his head. "Xavier says there's no one."

  Carrera thought about that for a minute. Harrington or Brown and I need Harrington as a loggie. He then said, "Brown?"

  "Sir."

  "I dub thee, 'Sancho Panzer.' You'll command the mech and tanks. You're going to go spend about a month and a half somewhere where nobody speaks a word of English to immerse you in Spanish."

  "Sir!" The single word meant: I won't let you down, Boss. Promise.

  The brief moved along, covering artillery and ground transportation

  "Twenty-four 105mm guns and six multiple rocket launchers will cost WHAT?"

  "We have an alternate plan to substitute twelve 122mm guns and twelve 160mm mortars, plus six Volgan . . . "

  By the time they got to individual equipment beyond small arms . . .

  "Twenty-two hundred FSD per man for body armor, Pat. Unless you want to go with something Terry Johnson has come up with."

  Johnson stood up. "I knew that figure would floor you. It floored me. So, off duty, I started nosing around the Globalnet. There are two developments I think you ought to consider. By the way, Harrington let me dip into discretionary funds to get this stuff."

  Johnson bent over and pulled what looked like a thick vest from under his chair. This he passed to Carrera.

  "What the fuck is this?" Carrera asked. "It's light."

  "It's silk, Pat, regular old silk. Well, not regular. It's specially woven and encased in polytetrafluoroethane cloth. That model is what this company in Rajamangala had available to send us. It's thirty-four layers of heavy duty silk and, yes, at about four and a half pounds, it's pretty light. It will stop anything up to .45 caliber but not .44. It will stop damned near all shrapnel. Though both .45 and heavy shrapnel will hurt. It will definitely not stop high powered rifle ammunition. Neither will the twenty-two hundred drachma vest the FSC makes which is also, by the way, a shitpot heavier."

  "Cost?"

  "One fifty to five hundred, depending. I say depending because there are some modifications we can make that would make it lighter and make it more effective. Some mods would lower the price but one modification also raises it substantially.

  "That modification is this." Johnson again reached down and handed over a four inch by twelve inch metal plate, about a tenth of an inch thick. The plate was deformed in five spots.

  "This is what is called 'glassy metal' or 'liquid metal.' It's an alloy of five metals—titanium, copper, nickel, zirconium and beryllium— that really don't like each other. It's cooled very quickly so that the metals can't form crystals. What they do form is an alloy about seven- eighths as dense as steel and two and a half times stronger. It's also precision castable. What that means to us is that we can make a plate a tenth of an inch thick out of this shit and have it be as strong as a quarter of an inch of good steel. We might also consider using it for some other things; bayonets come to mind, and maybe helmets.

  "I figure that we can make it something like the old Roman lorica, a series of thin plates maybe four inches by twelve or so and running partway across the chest and back, and over the shoulders, to cover all the really vital organs and the hard-to-rebuild shit, like shoulders, for maybe eleven pounds. Add that to the silk which, because we'll be able to make the chest and back portions thinner will reduce in weight, and you're looking at a fourteen pound set of torso armor."

  Carrera looked skeptical. "You tested the metal?"

  "I shot at it, yes. Those deformations are what I got firing different calibers. Got to warn you, armor piercing .30 cal and higher will go through if it hits straight on."

  "Fair enough. What's the total cost for a vest with the metal plates, again?"

  Johnson put out his hand, spreading his fingers and wiggling them slightly. "A little under five hundred drachma . . . give or take."

  "And that saves us," Carrera summed up, "about eight or nine million drachma. Which, even if this shit turns out not to be as good, is still eight or nine million I could spend on training, training which is at least as likely to save life, by killing the enemy, as a vest is. Okay. I'll think on this one though."

  Casa Linda, 6/10/459 AC

  Carrera and Abogado spoke privately on the balcony that led from his office to overlook the Mar Furioso. A steady drumbeat of electric crackles told of myriad mosquitoes being fried before they could come to feast.

  Abogado handed Carrera a thick notebook with rings. "These are people I've talked to about coming here for the FMTG that have indicated a willingness to come. No, I have not made an offer to any of them. It's set up by rank—former generals in front, then former colonels and lieutenant colonels, then other officers, other warrants, and noncoms—and the position I think they could fill. It isn't alphabetical."

  Carrera shrugged, took the book, and began flipping pages.

  Flip, flip, flip. "No, you can't have 'Moon' Mullins," he said, tearing a page out and laying it on the coffee table between them. "He's a toad, an incredibly stupid toad, and a sycophant. He brings out the worst in you; I've seen it." Flip, flip. "Hmmm . . . maybe." Flip, flip, flip. "Good choice on Frazar." Flip. "Lambert? No. He's the 'Salute in the Field' type. Had his Special Services Group operatives shaving when their mission required them to blend in with locals, none of whom shaved. Altogether too stupid for me to let near my boys." Flip, flip, flip, flip. "Bolger? Are you out of your fucking mind? Disloyal and treacherous. Mulholland? Nice gu
y but almost as stupid as he looks. Well . . . that's not quite fair; nobody could be that stupid. Maybe Mulholland." Flip, flip. "Mace? You have got to me shitting me! He could be a good stage manager in some major theater, great at putting on a show, but there's never a drop of substance behind the show. Add in . . . oh, off the top of my head, smuggling exotic birds and falsifying physical fitness tests. If he sets foot in this country again I'll have him shot. I wouldn't let him near my troops except in a sealed glass case marked, 'Be nothing like this man.'" Flip. "Taylor's very good."

  Looking up, Carrera saw that Abogado face had become a mix of frustration and worry. "Look . . . you saw these guys from one end. I saw them as peers or superiors and I saw something very different. The Army of the Federated States does a very bad job, generally, of choosing general officers. For the most part, they're charming men without an ounce of good character. How the hell could it be any different? In an environment where every decision is a moral one, where you get rated by fifty or sixty people before you're looked at for stars, the ones who make general are, almost entirely, those who never pissed anyone off. How does one never piss off the boss? Almost the only way is to have no real character, or at least no good character. The exceptions to that rule are just that, exceptional."

  "I had character," Abogado objected.

  "You were fucking the secretarial pool at Building Four on Fort Henry," Carrera pointed out. "I'll overlook that because you have other virtues. But let's not pretend that you aren't a rotter, too."

  Casa Linda, 7/10/459 AC

  True to his pledge, Carrera had not assumed command of the expeditionary force. When Kuralski asked him about that, he answered, "Dan, I don't need to be in the top position to be in control. I don't even want to be. Besides, I'll own every piece of equipment the legion is going to use, and be making the payroll. How much more control do I need?