Caliphate

by Tom Kratman

  "Figured what out?"

  "I'm gay. When I say 'seduce,' I mean seduce."

  "Fuck."

  "Only if necessary." The Chinese reached into Ling's small handbag and, smiling, produced a tube of lubricant. "But if necessary . . . "

  Highway 310, Northwest of ar-Rebchel, Province of Baya, 23 Muharram,

  1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

  Petra stood over Hans, her submachine gun held in both hands. Not knowing any way to help, she felt both useless and frustrated. She said as much.

  "Sis, you don't have to help," Hans assured her, as he lay behind one of the cylindrical mines aiming it precisely at a point in the road. "These things have to be set just right. Even Hamilton—and he's used to weapons—doesn't know how to aim them. He's doing the most he can just by lugging them to the firing positions."

  "If you say so," Petra said dubiously. "But I'd feel a lot better if I could help."

  "Fair enough," Hans agreed. "So tell me again how it's going to happen."

  "Okay," Petra agreed. "One: once they're all set up and wired together, with the detonators in the hole, I go to the hole and wait. If I get tired, I take one of the pills Bernie gave each of us. Two: after you tell me the assault on the castle and lab is underway, I wait some more until . . . Three: when the column comes from af-Fridhav I wait until the lead truck is right there"—her finger pointed at a boulder on the other side of the road—"and squeeze the first detonator. Four: even if that works, I press the second one anyway. I do it until the explosions begin. Five: I don't stick around, but crawl and then run toward an- Nessang. Six: there'll be a sedan waiting for me by the place John showed me. I get in back, lie on the floor, hold the bolt cutters to my chest, and cover myself with a blanket. Seven: you or John will come for me."

  "Good girl! There's something else you can do, too."

  "What's that?"

  Hans handed her a reel of electrical field wire and said, "Run this back to your hole."

  Flight Seven Nine Three, 23 Muharram,

  1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

  The city lights of an-Nurber, fewer and fainter now than they'd been a century prior, spread out below the ship to the port side. The crewman being blown by Lee in Ling's body barely noticed. Arching his back and groaning with the orgasm, he held the woman's head and pumped into her mouth like a bull.

  You son of a bitch, Ling's consciousness thought at Lee. I'm a houri; I'm not a slut.

  Quiet, Lee answered. This is for the mission.

  My ass . . . and thank the ancestors you haven't given one of the crewman that yet . . .

  Yet . . .

  The crewman stopped pumping, then half stumbled back onto the narrow bed in Ling's cabin. "Whew," he gasped. "That was great!"

  "Lie down," Lee said. "Relax. I'm not done with you yet."

  Obediently—who knew what delights this trim exotic body might hold—the crewman did, closing his eyes as he stretched out on the cot. Lee, meanwhile, rifled through Ling's bag as if for a condom, muttering, "Now where did I put that?"

  What Lee withdrew, however, was not a condom but a syringe, an autoinjector containing a serious muscle relaxer. Removing the cap and placing it on the upper part of the syringe to arm it, he struck the thing into the crewman's thigh. The crewman barely got a yelp out, and that a yelp not inconsistent with sex, before relaxing completely.

  "One down," Lee said aloud.

  Slut, Ling thought.

  Nothing wrong with mixing pleasure and business.

  Deftly, Lee flipped the crewman over on his belly, then took a roll of high strength tape from the bag. With this he taped the crewman's hands together and behind him, taped the feet together, and then taped the mouth shut. Lastly, Lee ran the tape around the crewman's neck, then to the head of the bed.

  "That should hold you."

  Before leaving, Lee took the trouble to reapply Ling's smeared lipstick. She knocked on Bongo's door and, when it was opened, said, "Cockpit next."

  Lee scratched at the cockpit door like a cat asking to be let in. Retief opened the door.

  "May I help you, miss?"

  "You may," Ling's sultry, breathy, desperate-sounding voice answered. "I haven't seen my master in two days. He'd kill me if I had sex with a kaffir. And the kaffir is too loyal, he'd report me if I tried. But I'm one of those with the kind of chip that makes me want to have it, to need to have it, every day. Won't one of you or . . . better still all of you, please, please help me?"

  "Let the poor girl in, Retief," the unseen captain said. "We can surely help her in her hour of need."

  God, Retief thought, what a shitty world when we do things like this to beautiful women. Hell, what a shitty world when things like this are done to anybody.

  Bongo looked in on Ling's cabin to make sure the crewman was still alive. Force of habit and training had made Lee hook the needle of the autoinjector through the crewman's shirt.

  One won't kill him, the agent thought. Probably. That was the only guard on this deck, too. Time to go down and check on the ship's own loading crew. Better said, time to go recruit.

  The loading crew were colored slaves. As such, they didn't automatically rise and bow with deference when Bongo made his appearance in their cramped cabin. They seemed startled, though, when he spoke to them not with the pidgin such people usually learned, but with as clear a diction as any baas. That surprise was as nothing, though, beside what they felt when they noticed the silenced submachine gun in his hand and the pistol strapped to his hip.

  "Gentlemen," Bongo began, "please sit and listen. I'd like to tell you a story about a man who died several hundred miles to the south of here, not quite two thousand and two hundred years ago.

  "His name was Spartacus . . ."

  Lee heard a mental laugh from Ling. Okay, you're a slut. But it just occurred to me that if these Boers knew what the sex was of the mind controlling my body, they'd all try to crawl out of their own skins with disgust.

  That's half the fun of it, Lee sent back. I wonder how is Matheson doing down below?

  Matheson declaimed, arms thrust up and out with the submachine grasped in the left hand, "'O comrades! Warriors! Thracians! If we must fight, let us fight for ourselves! If we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle!'"

  "This Spartacus fella, he say that?" asked one of the cargo slaves.

  "That, yes, or about that, but in a different language," Bongo answered, with no less truth than the purpose required.

  "And what happen to him?"

  "He fought. He won many battles. In the end he lost." Bongo hesitated over telling the rest but, "His followers were all killed. Over six thousand of them were crucified."

  All the slaves shook their heads at that. No they didn't want to be crucified.

  "But we have some advantages," Bongo added, "notably, that we're much closer to Switzerland. And Spartacus lacked machine guns."

  Bang! The hatch to the cockpit flew open with a single kick. Bongo . . . no, Matheson again; there was no more need to pretend . . . stormed in with his submachine gun in both hands, and a fierce gleam in his eye. Everyone, except for Ling's body, froze.

  He saw that both pilot and co-pilot were in various states of undress, with Ling's body kneeling between the captain's legs, head bobbing and the captain's fingers intertwined in Ling's hair. Retief was sitting at a console, studiously watching a screen and apparently trying very hard not to pay any attention to the minor orgy going on in the cockpit.

  "Take thees plane to Habana!" Matheson parodied, yet in a voice full of thunder. The slaves, the soon to be ex-slaves, given any luck, poured in behind him waving knives from the ship's galley.

  Lee immediately punched the captain in the crotch, stood, grabbed the shocked captain by the hair, and hauled him out of his seat, tossing him to the floor. He deftly swung Ling's body into place and took control of the airship.

  "Are you s
ure you can fly this thing?" Matheson asked.

  "People's Liberation Army Air Force Precision Airship Drill Team," Lee answered, "2109 to 2112. Yeah, yeah . . . we do a lot of silly shit in the CKPLAAF. By the way, dude, your timing sucks."

  Highway 310, Northwest of ar-Rebchel, Province of Baya, 23 Muharram,

  1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

  "We've got the ship," Hamilton heard in his ear. He didn't bother mentioning it to Hans; both he and Petra would have heard the same news. "We're going low. The control for Ling says his people are painting a false image for Caliphate Air Control. As disorganized as these people are, there's good reason to believe no one will notice us dropping off their screens for a while, if at all. ETA is about ninety- seven minutes. If you need us to speed up or slow down, let me know."

  "Wilco, Bernie," Hamilton sent back.

  Hans was just about to hook up the detonators to the twin wires that led, one from the right most mine, one from the left most, back to the hole. He attached the wires and then laid the detonators on the ground. Petra looked at them nervously.

  "It will be fine, Petra," Hans said, glancing up at Hamilton to suggest that he, too, offer some words of comfort.

  Hamilton knelt down on one knee to bring his face almost parallel to the girl's. "Honey, Hans or I will come for you. I promise. And . . . "

  "Yes?"

  He looked very seriously into her eyes, just visible with the scattered moonlight coming through the tree. "Just . . . I love you. I should have said it before but it comes hard to me. Please, though, remember that."

  In answer Petra threw her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. She pulled back after half a minute, looked into his eyes, and said, "I never before knew it was possible to love a man who wasn't a blood relation. Now go before I start to cry."

  With that, Hans and Hamilton raced for Hans' borrowed truck. Initially, both went into the cargo compartment, where Hans began to cover Hamilton with a tarp. Other things were in back, too, notably jars full of cyanide crystals, sulfuric acid, a bomb ginned up by Richter via Matheson, and their weapons and ammunition.

  "This is the first time I'll have been in action." Hans gulped, holding the tarp over Hamilton and their arms. "I just realized that I'm more nervous than Petra is."

  "Don't be," Hamilton answered. "I've been in the shit a lot. Trust me, you're a natural."

  "Thanks," Hans said sheepishly. Still, the compliment did make him feel more confident, as it was intended to. "By the way, I really am sorry for punching you."

  "Don't mention it. If you hadn't, we wouldn't have gotten as far as we have."

  Flight Seven Nine Three, 23 Muharram,

  1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

  The great white whale of an airship turned slowly to the left and southward as it descended. For as long as the deception held, Chinese intelligence would be portraying the ship as still moving northward at eighty-three hundred feet over ground level. In fact, it was moving the other way at under eight hundred.

  Lee/Ling was at the controls, wearing a set of the night vision goggles Hans had pinched from the unit arms room perched atop his/ her head. This was only a backup. Although the Chinese had killed all marking lights, and shut off all active navigation aids, the better to avoid detection, the ship itself had excellent passive limited visibility.

  The captain and exec, along with most of the rest of the white crew, were down below, guarded by some of the former cargo slaves. Only Retief and three of the former slaves remained in the control cabin and for that there was a special reason.

  Ignoring the flight engineer for the moment, Matheson asked, "How far down are you going to take us?"

  "Just another fifty or sixty meters," Lee answered. "Any lower and people on the ground will be able to hear our engines. Any higher and we'll make a radar signal the Caliphate might pick up. Even at that height, though, there are places where we're going to appear on someone's radar screen."

  "What can we do about that?" Matheson asked.

  "Ourselves? Not much. My people back in Shanghai, the ones creating a false image of us proceeding north, are going to be trying to catch any time we appear on the radar and eliminate the trace on the screens. But they're not going to know we're there until after we've appeared. So there are going to be a few seconds every now and again when we will appear."

  "Won't that cause the Caliphate to scramble fighters to investigate? I mean, in the Empire we'd be all over any unexplained radar signal like flies on shit."

  "I don't think so," answered the Chinese. "Neither does the Ministry of State Security. Besides, you Yankees are paranoid. People in the Caliphate are just used to things going wrong. 'Will of Allah,' and all that. I think we'll be okay."

  "She's got that right," Retief interjected.

  "He," Lee corrected.

  "He?"

  Matheson explained. As he did, Retief began to laugh. "Oh, I can hardly wait to tell the captain he was being blown by a man."

  Matheson didn't laugh, nor even smile. "Mr. Retief, I need to ask you a few questions. You need to think over your answers carefully."

  "All right," Retief agreed.

  "The man you might remember as De Wet—no need for you to know his real name—suggested to me that you have some . . . issues . . . with the slave trade."

  "I do," Retief agreed.

  "Enough for you to strike a blow against it? Before you answer that, you need to know that the primary purpose of the mission on which I am engaged is not to strike such a blow. It has, however, become the price we must pay to succeed in that mission."

  Retief thought on that one, before answering, "I hate the trade. I hate my part in it. But I have family back home and they will suffer if I help you. That's what you're getting at, isn't it; you want my help?"

  "How will they suffer?" Matheson asked. "Are you talking salary and finances or are you talking reprisal?"

  "Both."

  "What if I could guarantee you a diplomatic trade for your family, and guaranteed employment in the Empire?"

  "You can't guarantee such a trade," Retief answered.

  "Watch him," Matheson told the remaining cargo slave guards. He then turned away, walked to the empty copilot's chair, and sat down. His eyes closed.

  "What's going on?" Retief asked.

  "He's communicating with higher," Lee/Ling answered, while deftly tapping some control or other. "Shut up and let him do so."

  Castle Honsvang, Province of Baya, 23 Muharram,

  1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

  "I'm pulling up to the castle gate," Hans told Hamilton through the earpiece communicator. "Be very still."

  "I understand," Hamilton sent back. He felt the brakes bite, heard their screech. The truck slowed and then shuddered to a stop.

  "Evening, sir," the gate guard said. "You're back late."

  "I was out looking for a place for a night exercise," Hans lied. "I think I found a good one, too."

  "Allah help us, sir," the guard answered, rolling his eyes heavenward but then smiling to show it was a friendly joke. He turned around and lifted the crossbar from across the roadway. Without another word, but with a friendly wave, Hans guided the truck into the compound. Before reaching the castle proper, into which the truck would never fit, Hans turned right and drove toward the motor park. There he stopped, put on the emergency brake, but left the engine running for the moment.

  "We're here," he whispered into his communicator. "There's a roving guard walking by. I may have to speak to him. I'll let you know when it's clear."

  Castle Noisvastei, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,

  1538 AH (4 November, 2113)

  Sig the armorer sipped at something clear and cold and not strictly legal. Through a window he looked down at the other castle, brightly lit by security lights. He saw a truck pull in and though it was too far away to make out the driver, Sig thought it was the odabasi, no doubt returning from some late night foray to find some new training opportunity for the unit.
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  And isn't that just like the boy? thought the armorer. When he could be here, enjoying the warmth of the women, instead he's out on a cold night looking for ways to make of our company better men. A fine lad, that he is.

  The first sergeant stopped by Sig's booth, a young houri in each arm, and said, "Not too much of that, you hear, Sig?"

  "Never fear about me, Baseski. I never take more than Allah is likely to forgive me for."

  Interlude