A Desert Called Peace

by Tom Kratman

"As shall I be, Legate Carrera," smirked Fernandez. "So if we could have that talk now . . ."

  For such a sensitive matter neither the front steps to the casa nor even the dining room would do. Instead, Fernandez and Carrera repaired to the basement conference room.

  "What the hell do you need an 'Intelligence Gathering Ship' for, Fernandez? There is no way I can afford the equipment you would need to gather intelligence from a ship. You have no people trained for the equipment anyway. I cannot afford more people from Europe or the FSC, either, not with what I am paying for trainers."

  Fernandez gave a tiny and wintery smile. "It is not to gather intelligence from the ship. It is to gather intelligence in the ship. I have in mind a prison cum interrogation vessel."

  "But why on a ship? We can put up tents and string wire much, much more cheaply."

  "Yes, you can, Patricio. And you can have Amnesty Interplanetary, Liberation International, Freedom of Conscience, the World League and every other cosmopolitan progressive organization breathing down your neck and harassing you twenty-four hours a day. A ship— a ship that never comes to port—prevents that."

  "But what do I care if . . . oh, you are talking about them objecting to . . . what shall we say? 'Rigorous' interrogation methods?"

  "Precisely," Fernandez agreed.

  Carrera considered for a bit. There was a time I would not have permitted anything like torture. Now? Do I still care now? Maybe not. It would have mattered to Linda and that would have once made me care. Then, too, the bar on torture was a bar to torturing real soldiers, honorable men and women. What consideration do I owe to those who kill innocent people deliberately? Maybe none.

  "What do you have in mind and why?" Carrera asked.

  "To begin with, Patricio, pain, force and violence, either physical or mental, are always at least implicit in any interrogation, in war or in peace. It may have been the rack and the hot pincers in the Middle Ages, or it could be a longer sentence—or at least not a shorter sentence—to some hell hole of a prison now, for failure to cooperate. The person being interrogated has no—let me say that again, no— reason to cooperate without some threat or violence."

  "Yet some do," Carrera objected.

  "Oh, yes," Fernandez admitted, "whether in police work or intelligence work, you will sometimes get someone who sings like a bird from the moment you bring him in. In ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, Patricio, even then he is responding to the fear that he might be subject to force and violence. And the other one in a hundred? He's likely to just be a nut from whom you can't get anything of value."

  "Witch trials?" Carrera objected again. "Forced, valueless confessions? What about all those people on Old Earth who confessed to being what they could not possibly have been, and to doing what they could not possibly have done?"

  Fernandez's face acquired the indulgent smile professionals sometimes confer on tyros. "In the first place," he said, "the price of confessing to witchcraft was, for a first offense, generally nil. Some not too onerous penance, and being watched carefully for a time thereafter. On the other hand, the penalty for not confessing was often quite awful. If we were interested in obtaining confessions for witchcraft, your objection might be valid. We are not. I am interested only in intelligence which can be corroborated, a very different proposition."

  Carrera shook his head, unconvinced. "People will still say anything to avoid torture. You can't count on it."

  "Anything, Patricio? That is what you said, is it not: 'anything'? Is not the truth also 'anything'? Will people not speak the truth to avoid torture as well?"

  Fernandez knew Carrera smoked. He took out a cigarette and lit it before adding, "The trick is that you have to have something to work with, some intelligence the person being interrogated does not know you have that you can use to trick him with. You catch him in a lie and then you apply enough duress that he is terrified ever to lie again. Sometimes it takes catching him in two or three lies before you break him, but break him you will provided that you are ruthless enough and have some means of corroboration. Sometimes, if the interrogator is skilled, he can sense when someone's lying if not about precisely what. Then he applies duress until the man contradicts what he had said previously. That's tricky, though, and not everyone can pull it off.

  "And then, too, sometimes you can get instantaneous feedback even if you know nothing. If you catch two people who know the same information, you separate them before they can concoct all that complete a story. Apply duress—oh, all right!—torture, until their stories match. Or, too, if you have a true ticking time bomb scenario, your feedback is when the bomb is found. You torture until then."

  "It's sickening," Carrera said. Apparently he had some of his old sensibilities left, after all. He was honestly surprised at himself. "Just sickening."

  "So? If you are willing to let men be crippled and killed for you under your command, don't you think you owe them a little nausea on your part to give them the best possible chance to live and win?"

  Carrera started to answer, and then stopped cold. Perhaps I do.

  "All right, tell me exactly what you have in mind and how it will operate."

  Hamilton, FD, Federated States of Columbia,

  15/10/459 AC

  Carrera wore a suit and tie—God, I hate ties!—and carried an old leather coat over one arm. Unaccompanied, he entered the senator's reception area and announced himself as, "Patrick Hennessey. I believe I have an appointment."

  "Oh, yes, sir" the receptionist said. "The senator was very explicit that you were to be given every courtesy and shown right to her office . . . but . . ." The girl looked stricken.

  "But?"

  "She's tied up in a meeting and won't be quite on time. "Fifteen minutes late, she told me, 'no more.' I'm terribly sorry."

  "That'll be fine."

  "If you will follow me, sir."

  Hennessey followed the receptionist to a tastefully decorated office. He noted the probable expense with disapproval, then chided himself for being a cheap prude. Apparently the senator, Harriett Rodman, felt nothing was too good for her comfort and prestige. In the unreal political world of Hamilton, he conceded that she probably had a point.

  When he had asked the attorney, Mr. Tweed, about Rodman, he had answered, succinctly, "Corrupt, venal, power hungry. She can be bought, however, and for only a modest interest payment will stay bought. There is, after all, Colonel Hennessey, sometimes honor among thieves."

  Hennessey thought, by her description, that Rodman would be perfect. A little money—very little, actually, in comparison to the family trust at full value—and she could be a strong arm at his side, pushing, prodding, nagging and threatening to force the Federated States' military to give things they otherwise might have been most reluctant to give.

  He heard a sound from the open doorway. "Colonel Hennessey!" exclaimed Senator Rodman, almost as if she were truly happy to see him for himself. "I am so pleased to meet you . . . and so terribly sorry about what happened to your family."

  Dripping mutual insincerities for the next two hours, Hennessey and the senator worked out a deal favorable to both of them.

  UEPF Spirit of Peace

  Khan and her husband had asked for a special appointment with the high admiral. Given the offices they held, the appointment had been readily granted. Rather than meet in his office, however, Robinson had, on a whim, told them to meet him on the Peace's observation deck.

  This was a small area, relative to the size of the ship, with a thick, transparent viewing point. Normally, the port was protected by thick, retractable protective shields. Those shields were withdrawn to the sides now, allowing Robinson unimpeded view of the planet slowly spinning below.

  Neither Khan nor her husband were privy to the full scope of their admiral's plans and intentions. Some things were better left unsaid, after all. Nonetheless, from the high admiral's questions and interests they'd surmised some important portions of what he wanted, not merely what he wanted to kn
ow about, but also what he wanted to happen.

  Khan, the wife, began the informal briefing.

  "High Admiral, do you recall my saying that the kind of war mattered?" she asked. Seeing that he did, she continued, "Well, there is a new development down below that might change the nature of the war. Note, please, sir, that I only say it could, not that it will or must."

  Robinson, who had been watching as the continents of Uhuru and Taurus slowly spun by, lifted his eyes from the planet and looked directly at the speaker. She was informally dressed in a long, flower- printed skirt. Her bare breasts stood out magnificently in the low, shipboard gravity, the nipples pert from the cool air blowing across the observation deck.

  A much more attractive view than the cesspool below, thought Robinson. "What development?"

  "One we did not predict and are still investigating," Khan, the husband, answered. "There is a force building, down below, that was not in any of our initial calculations. Right now, all we can say definitively, is that it will be about the size of a brigade, that it will be technologically primitive in comparison to the most sophisticated armed groups on the planet, but that it is unlikely to be constrained by the web of treaties and accords your predecessors have thrown up around most of the planet's armed forces."

  "You mean to act like the Federated States?"

  "No, sir," answered the wife. "We expect it to be much worse than that."

  Interlude

  29 July, 2067, alongside Colonization Ship Cheng Ho

  The UNSS Kofi Annan adopted almost the same high orbit as the ghost ship, only a touch farther out. This allowed the captain of the Annan to watch as the launch neared the derelict and docked.

  "There's still a charge to the batteries, Captain," the Marine officer in charge of the away party announced. "The hatch is cycling and . . . we're in. Good Lord, the radiation is bad! Skipper, this ship is so hot we couldn't even hope to scrap it for a thousand years."

  "Very good, Major Ridilla. Put us on visual please."

  "Wilco." The Cheng Ho suddenly disappeared from the bridge's view screen, being replaced by the view from the Marine's helmet cam.

  "Where to first, Skipper?" asked Ridilla.

  "Check out the bridge to the Cheng Ho," ordered the captain. The image on the view screen wobbled as the Marine walked forward under the small gravity provided by the Cheng Ho's spin, his magnetic boots gripping the deck lightly.

  "Stop," the captain ordered. "What's that writing on the walls?"

  "No clue, Captain," Ridilla answered. "I can't read Arabic."

  "Hold on the image, Major." The captain looked around the bridge. "Who can read Arabic?" she asked.

  "I can, Skipper," answered a lieutenant at life support. "It's from Sura Forty of the Koran. It says, 'Whose is the kingdom on that day? God's, the One, the Dominant!'"

  "Thank you, Lieutenant. Stand by and give me translations if Major Ridilla finds more. Proceed, Major."

  "Aye, aye, Skipper."

  Time passed slowly on the bridge, with little on the view screen but a trembling image and nothing to hear but the hum of the Annan and Ridilla's labored breathing.

  "I've got bodies, Skipper . . . twelve . . . no . . . fourteen. Mostly young but there's one old guy with a beard. The radiation must have killed any bacteria and the cold preserved them."

  The captain ordered, "Show me." The image on the view screen twisted down to show the fourteen corpses identified by Ridilla. They were all but one young men, half of them bearded and half clean- shaven, apparently locked with each other in deathgrips at a point where two corridors of the Cheng Ho met. One young man, frozen eyes staring blind at the opposite bulkhead, had managed to sit up before he died. The arms were clutched around a stomach wound and bloody icicles trailed outward from the fingers.

  Other bodies, singly and in pairs, dotted the way to the ghost ship's bridge. Most had apparently been killed by cutting or stabbing implements. There were only two obvious gunshot wounds, both of those outside the sealed hatch to the Cheng Ho's own bridge.

  "The hatch is locked tight, Skipper," Major Ridilla announced. "We are cutting through."

  "I want the log for the Cheng Ho, Major. I want to know what happened on that ship."

  Chapter Twelve

  Hardship, poverty, and want are the best school for a soldier.

  —Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Maxim LVIII

  We become brave by doing brave acts,

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys the war can't be won without.

  —Ernie Pyle

  Fort Cameron, Centro de Instruccion Militar,

  20/3/460 AC, 3:30 AM

  A shrill blast of a whistle matched with a sudden glaring light awoke Cruz from a rather pleasant dream of Caridad. She was walking toward him, wearing nothing but an inviting smile . . .

  "Get up! Get up, you shitty little maggots. Move your nasty, lazy, chingada asses out of my tent. Put on your sneakers and shorts and move! You, chico! Do you think you're being paid to sleep all day? Out! Out! OUT!"

  The infantry corporal—his nametag read "del Valle"—strode quickly down the tent between two rows of cots. As he did so he overturned each one, spilling its occupant out onto the muddy tent floor. Cruz, who had been sleeping on his back, landed on his face, driving mud into his mouth and up his nostrils.

  From somewhere off in the distance a loudspeaker was blaring out some sort of martial music at an indecent volume. Dimly heard by the tent's occupants, other new recruits in adjacent tents were being subjected to the same treatment. The corporal no sooner reached the last cot than he began herding, sometimes with punches and kicks, the stunned and bewildered recruits outside into the street that fronted the tent.

  Disoriented, tired, confused . . . and sneezing; Ricardo Cruz followed the rest of his tent mates, sheeplike, into the night.

  Cruz had arrived at Cameron only about five hours before. He and seventy-nine other volunteers had been bussed from the police station in Las Mesas starting at seven PM the previous evening. A long and deliberately slow drive to the Centro de Instruccion Militar had brought them through Fort Cameron's front gate just after nine. The bus dropped the new recruits off in front of a mess hall. Met there by a friendly-faced sergeant, they were fed a light snack, and then issued running shoes and shorts, ponchos and poncho liners—thin nylon quilts—and smallish, inadequate pillows. This had taken until just before midnight.

  Then that deceptively friendly, warmly smiling sergeant had guided them—they didn't yet know how to march—to their tents. Cruz had gone to sleep shortly after midnight.

  So it was that an extremely tired Ricardo Cruz was hustled out into the street at three-thirty in the morning to face the wrath of his new squad leader. On either side of Cruz's tent's group, more of the new volunteers were also spilling out into the street. None had on anything more than their shorts, T-shirt, socks and running shoes. A couple still seemed to be pulling on shorts. One of these went down face first into the mud, a corporal's kick to his fundament providing the motive power.

  Cruz had a moment to look around before one of the omnipresent corporals shoved him into the formation that was building in the dirt street. Opposite from where Cruz stood was a line of grim-visaged soldiers wearing running shoes and shorts, black T-shirts and hostile glares. Behind the line of men there was a square podium. From the podium two men oversaw the scene. One of these was short and stocky. He looked to be a rather medium olive color, though in the dark Cruz couldn't be sure. Next to him stood a very tall and slender, graying but not balding black man. The black looked somewhat elderly in the face as well, his skin deeply seamed by what must have been years of exposure to the elements. Still, he carried himself like a young man, a very proud young man. Over the shouting of the corporals and the murmuring of his fel
low volunteers, Cruz could not hear what the black man was saying.

  Sergeant Major McNamara, standing to the right of First Centurion Epolito Martinez, gave a few last minute words of advice before moving on to look over the next company of new trainees. When speaking Spanish, the sergeant major sounded very like a native of Cristobal, in the Republic, with only rare conversion of the English "th" sound into "t." That was no surprise to those who knew him; his wife was a native of that place.

  "There's no moment more critical than this one, Martinez," the sergeant major said. "Too forceful and you'll frighten them silly for months. Too little and they'll stop paying attention in a few days. What becomes of your company in the next several months all depends on what you do here in the next few minutes. You have shocked them. That's good. The shock will keep them in line until you have time to build some discipline in them, especially self-discipline. Remember, though, it is a tricky job, creating self-discipline. The more you impose discipline from the outside, the less they will build on the inside. Tricky."

  Martinez, although a soldier for more than fifteen years, was unused to the task of training new troops. He listened attentively to what the big gringo sergeant major had to say. As McNamara stepped off the podium, Martinez stepped up to its edge and began to address the company.

  "Welcome, volunteers, to Fort Cameron. I am First Centurion Martinez. You will address me as 'Centurion.' Together with your centurions of centuries, section leaders, and team leaders, we will, I am sure, turn most of you into soldiers the country can be proud of." Martinez shook his head in seeming regret, his face looking sad, even mournful. "Unfortunately, we will probably have to kill some of you first."

  In the ranks, the men around Cruz—Cruz, himself, for that matter—gulped. The way Martinez had said it, there could be no doubt but that some of the new boys would be killed in training.