“They want to see SPLM troops on WNN riding through downtown Hargeisa and Berbera.”
“Do they want Dhul-Fiqaar executed on the front lawn of the Presidential Palace too?” the Dutch mercenary scoffed. “You’re saying they’re not sending any more aid until after the attack.”
The older Somali spread his hands in a mock apology. “I’m afraid so. Riyadh assures us generous assistance will be forthcoming once I assume office.”
“I bet,” Colonel Deer Voort said. He took a moment to quench his cynicism, then spoke in a lowered voice. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say your allies were bleeding you dry, Professor Hamid.”
Their eyes met. “Perhaps it is Allah’s blessing in disguise. I’m already more indebted than I care to be,” he said. “Although they did offer another platoon of Sia-qa commandos… to reinforce my personal guard.”
The colonel sneered. “I have to push past more of them every time I come in here. The swarthy little bastards are multiplying like mice.”
“They seem to be the only thing Riyadh has in abundance. Them and more demands for cargo ship interdiction.”
“You’re going to need those pirates and their boats to take Berbera.”
“I know.”
“Or you could send in a first wave of Egyptian commandos,” the colonel suggested lightly.
A wry grin showed the wrinkle of crow’s feet around his eyes. “They have vowed to never to leave my side,” the Professor said.
“Shame. Speaking of being at your side… You’re transferring Eshu International to the Muharib?”
“You object?”
The tall Dutchman kept his face carefully neutral. “I respect your decision, Professor. Bowna was remarkable—even noble. But Eshu is based in the Belfast Metro Zone. How can they not be connected to Dawson-Hull? Also, there’s the matter of their clones.”
“Colonel, Bowna is why I selected them. Their clones took part in the rescue; did you know that?”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that I received a conflicting report from another unit I had in the area at that time. Eshu’s heroics might have been… overstated.”
“Did this other unit take part in the fighting?”
“No, sir,” the colonel admitted. “They arrived too late to engage any SNA units.”
“Then I don’t care to hear their report.”
“And the Series Sevens?” the colonel persisted. “There’s a reason the U.N. burned their bodies after Victoria’s Falls. They’re unpredictable. It’s too serious a risk to let them near you.”
“They won’t be too near; Major Sajiid is their immediate commander. Besides, I’m about to ask thousands of men to risk their lives,” Professor Hamid replied. “I can’t ask them to do what I’m not willing to.”
“Except that you’re their leader. You have to stay alive to run the country.”
“After almost four years of fighting, a chance for victory is finally on the horizon. But the closer we get, the more it feels like I’m caught between a lion and a cliff. I need to stack some of these risks in my favor.”
“Then let me bump up your personal security. I can order two more nano-tube suits.”
“And spend the last of our money on two men? No.” Professor Hamid shook his head. “Call it a feeling, call it intuition, but I believe I can trust these mercenaries from Belfast. I want them with us when we attack the palace.”
“As you wish, Professor,” Colonel Deer Voort yielded. “If I may ask, what do you plan to do with General Dhul-Fiqaar?”
It was a moment before the old Somali answered. The colonel noticed he took a long breath, inhaling through his nose. “If we win? If he’s still alive? I’ll put him on public trial,” he said softly.
The Dutch mercenary was startled. “A trial? Why not a dirt nap in an unmarked grave? No one would bat an eye. In fact, you’d have a million people dancing in the streets.”
Professor Hamid gazed at the 3D display of the Somaliland countryside in the center of the operations floor. “Part of me would be giddy to join them, but the Koran says that Allah has willed upon himself the law of grace and mercy. Should I do otherwise?” He looked the taller soldier in the face. “I want Somaliland to be a Muslim country, but I want her to be a strong, civilized society. Most of the Western media, when they deign to cover the war at all, paint me as some sort of Ayatollah. I take office, and next week it’s burqas and public stonings at half time. If, Insha’Allah, we carry the day, I must do whatever I can to show the world devotion doesn’t equate with ignorance. Not all the faithful are fanatics.”
Colonel Deer Voort returned the older man’s gaze. “I can respect that.” The Dutch soldier hesitated, then added, “But if the attacks fail, do you want me to work out a contingency plan to get you and the SPLM leadership out of the country?”
This time there was no delay before Professor Hamid answered. “No. I want everything committed—no reserves, no retreat, no regrets. One way or another, this will be our final offensive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE – Catfood
SPLM Camp, near Biye K’obe, Ethiopia
They say karma’s only a bitch if you are one, but I’m convinced no good deed goes unpunished.
News of Bowna spread around the SPLM camp like a brushfire. Soldiers stepped aside wherever we went like in the movies or something. Everyone was all smiles, clapping us on the back like new best friends. Other contractors conjured up extra food or nips of booze they’d stashed away, wanting to hear all about the ass-kicking we gave Duub Cas. Tam and I glossed over parts with the Triplets, passing credit to the Legion instead. Memories of N’Kosa Mambi’s combat clones ran too deep, even for the Dark Continent, and the Ukrainians were all too happy to drink someone else’s liquor while basking in borrowed glory. So while they washed down homemade cookies with nips of Seagrams, our Killer Bunnies camped in the bush twelve kilometers away from the base. Aeschylus was right: truth is the first casualty of war.
The rest of Eshu grinned, milked it for all it was worth, and said a whole lot of nothing. Nobody pressed us with hard questions anyway; it’s reassuring to think your enemy is incompetent. We reinforced that notion. We were a good luck charm—a mascot—and no one wanted to break the spell.
At the end of the day though, there’s not much difference between a spotlight and cross-hairs. Celebrity makes you a target. The second something goes sour, you’re first against the wall. Bowna might have got us closer to the Professor, but it had us looking over our shoulders every minute.
The only good notes were Alpha and the Egyptians.
Word got around that Alpha had lurked in the woods while we and the Legion tussled with the Red Berets. Other teams started avoiding them, then the Somali militia refused to go with them even on routine patrols.
Tam and I caught Dratshev and Svetlana complaining to Colonel Deer Voort. They clammed up the moment we came within earshot, but it was obvious the Russians were a heartbeat away from aneurysms. It couldn’t happen to a nicer couple in my opinion.
As far as the Egyptians went, it was pure bliss—on our part anyway. Assigned to the Professor’s Muharib Guard, we now had unrestricted access to the command bunker. Major Achmed the Acne-Scarred was rigid with loathing. Overnight, Tam and I had gone from infidel scum to infidel scum he had to salute. Every recon briefing, I strolled past his Sia-qa commandos whistling Cruise Missiles and Camel Jockeys. Poor bastard must have lost sleep imagining new ways to torture us with cattle prods.
The fun lasted almost a week.
Five days after Bowna, preparations for the SPLM’s final offensive were complete. The hardened targets—military bases, police stations, power plants and the two airports at Hargeisa and Burco—were assigned to the foreign contractors. Small SPLM units would ride along to assist, but mostly they were there to mop up after the mercenaries had done the heavy lifting. The local militia cadres were split evenly. Half were already in staging areas just inside Ethiopia, while the rest slipped across the border
and melted into the main cities of Hargeisa, Berbera and Burco. Caches of small arms and munitions had been planted weeks earlier. They went to cause trouble, to keep the Hangash and Somaliland Army guessing until it was time to blow the lid.
Major Sajiid assembled the Muharib Guard north of Biye K’obe. Three hundred plus veteran Somali fighters buffed with Italian Centauro light armor vehicles and Chinese mobile jammers. Their orders were to seize the Presidential Palace. Friendly sources said Dhul-Fiqaar had bunkered down there with an unknown quantity of troops like a rat backed into his hole. The fighting was expected to be vicious.
Deer Voort ordered the command staff to pack up. They’d accompany us to the palace. The place was just too symbolic, and the rebel leadership wanted to broadcast from inside the mansion the moment it fell. Forty-eight hours to step off, and the promise of violence coiled in the air like storm clouds. All we were waiting on was a final peek-a-boo pass from the Muslim Brotherhood drones.
At forty hours to go, Poet9 took Curro down to Ji Jiga for a last-minute go-over on the Falcos. We wanted our own drones in the air once the lead started flying. So far, our pay-offs to the airport manager there had worked out, but he wanted to triple-check the IFF tags on our UAVs. Hester had provided just enough for the seven of us, our Polaris four-by-fours, and both our UAVs. The little Irishman had sworn the miniature transponders would keep D-H targeting systems from locking on to us, but combat was in the forecast, and the SPLM was getting reports of corporate-marked Airbus cargo planes off-loading at Hargeisa International. Apparently, the British corporation’s Corporate Security Services had taken over an entire hangar on the north side, and a lot of sleek, spaceship-looking aerial drones were lined up on the adjacent runway.
“I’m guessing those are the Nemesis prototypes,” Tam said.
Poet9 studied a grainy photograph. “Si. Looks like this little war just volunteered to help Ballard United with combat trials.”
Tam tapped one of Hester’s small black boxes with its thick cylinder antenna. “Damn things better work. If Dawson-Hull turns on that ‘not-SkyNet’ A.I. system, the lead will get real thick, real fast. We’ll need lots of robot-love so we don’t end up kibbled all over the veldt.”
Poet9 flipped on his Oakleys and mangled an Austrian accent. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”
Tam rolled his eyes. “So long as it’s by tomorrow night.”
Poet9 and Curro rode off, and Tam turned to me. “Radio the Triplets to meet us at Al-Kuul in two hours. Deer Voort wants us to check on rumors about SNA armor around the Wadabariis township.”
Rumors are a soldier’s pastime, some even elevate it to an art form. “We’re chasing campfire gossip? Can’t we send the Ukrainians?”
Tam shook his head. “Hung over.”
“That bad?” I asked.
“In worse shape than their golf carts. I got Sajiid to second them to us. They’re coming to the palace with us. Let ’em rest.” He paused. “Besides, we need to talk about the Professor.”
Nodding, I grabbed three boxes of brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts from the rations crate. Beside the boy Abdi, they were the only things the Triplets asked about.
***
The shit hit the fan while we were away.
There are reasons people fear the Triplets, not just old African war stories.
The first combat clones were developed in 2041 by the U.S. military’s Bio-Weapon Division after a decade of two back-to-back overseas wars and three large-scale domestic security actions. Fearing for their careers, and in a few cases their lives, nervous politicians demanded the DoD come up with a solution that would placate battered, war-weary, voters. Apparently, Americans were fed up with flag-draped coffins, grieving families, and mounting taxes. Who could blame them?
Ironically, when the Pentagon announced the first successful clone trials, massive demonstrations erupted. There were protests outside the military bases, rallies on the D.C. National Plaza, and riots in every major city from Manhattan to San Francisco. P.E.T.R.—People for the Ethical Treatment of Replicants—clashed in the streets almost daily with the Divine Right group, a coalition of fundamentalist Christians and labor unions, while special police units fought with both of them. For six long months, the United States was wracked by massive civil disturbances over the Defense Department’s clone program.
It took martial law and an Act of Congress to quell the violence. The Clone Laws were passed in December of 2042, strictly confining the type, number and use of replicants. Once the average citizen was assured clones weren’t after their jobs and were treated, if not quite as human then at least humanely, the furor died down. The army got its replicant boots on the ground, and the voters got a break from funerals. After all, clones were nobody’s kid.
Exact numbers are still classified, but it’s estimated two hundred thousand ADRs (Active Duty Replicants) were created and deployed within five years of the program’s inception. Earth’s industrialized nations followed suit, and five years later, clone soldiers were fighting and dying under every flag on every continent on the planet.
And beyond.
When the Eastern corporate giant, Asian-Pacific, initiated the Luna Colonization Expedition, every single habitat on the Mare Imbrium was replicant-built. No one thought twice about fifty-percent fatalities—clone labor was easily replaced. The original workforce’s barracks at Copernicus later served as the foundation for the infamous Luna Penal Colony.
By 2050, cloning was considered an unqualified, if uncomfortable, scientific breakthrough.
Until N’Kosa Mambi and the African Bush Wars.
Dictator by military fiat in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mambi maintained he was a reincarnation of the ancient African warrior, Shaka Zulu. His Christmas 2050 coronation speech was a two-hour tirade announcing his Divine appointment to unite the continent under his rule. By the end of the decade, he claimed, Africa would be powerful, prosperous, and free from the plague of Western colonial influence. It was destiny: the West was crumbling, the East was insular. Africa was the next superpower.
Mambi was charismatic, compelling, and absolutely mad. His leadership model made Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe look like relief workers, so it wasn’t surprising other African nations didn’t share in his epiphany.
Knowing he couldn’t bring his revelation to pass with a third-world army and cast-off military hardware, Mambi leveraged his country’s diamond mines to build cloning labs high on the Katanga Plateau, which were then staffed with rogue bio-weapon scientists out of South Africa.
A year later, Mambi unleashed his Series Seven combat clones into the veldt.
In their obsession to create the ultimate shock troops, the Pretoria geneticists tampered with the standard military gene-template until they broke it. In deliberately limiting intellect while maximizing physical traits, they inadvertently introduced autism and albinism into the DNA sequence. The Katanga Labs managed to create lethal savants—thousands of inhumanely fast, unbelievably strong, pale-skinned killers with the minds of children. Mambi’s generals were more than pleased, initiating ruthless training regimens that brutalized the clones into shocked, unquestioning obedience. For two years, the Kimungu Hasira—Divine Wrath—burned paths across Angola, Zambia, and Zimbabwe that were so bloody, so savage, it shocked the entire world.
A thousand towns and villages were razed, not a stick left upright. Civilian inhabitants were slaughtered or sold into slavery, army prisoners executed en masse. Reports of torture, mutilation, and cannibalism were rampant. Death followed everywhere the Nzimu—the pale ghosts—set foot. The epic, four-day battle between the U.N. and DRC forces at Victoria Falls decided the issue once and for all. In the end, the Kimungu Hasira were exterminated and N’Kosa Mambi was tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity. The trial went on for eight months at the cost of 1.2 billion Euros. His pay-per-view execution netted two hundred ninety million dollars in revenue.
Our Killer Bunnies, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, were
the last Series Sevens in existence. And they were our friends.
Tam and I had hired Abdi and what was left of his Harimacad gang. Most of them had died out on the plains fighting the Gladiator GUTV drones, so all that was left of the “Cheetahs” was a half-dozen teenage boys decked out in knock-off hip-hop clothing with rickety Chinese AKs. They were sufficiently awed by five hundred Euros a week and Abdi’s stories about the Triplets to refrain from stealing anything important.
***
Thirty hours before we were scheduled to head north with the Muharib Guard, Abdi met us with the news.
Tam and I were returning from our run up to the border—no government armor in sight—the Triplets had split off to their own camp. We were riding down a dirt road twenty klicks from Biye K’obe when we spotted his red shirt. He was running—scared.
We stopped.
Abdi was frantic when he met us. “Catfood,” he panted. “Poet9 tells to say ‘catfood’.”
Tam and I exchanged a glance. “Who’s catfood, Abdi?” Tam asked. “What happened?”
“The white colonel come to your tents looking for you. He has many soldiers, all angry. Them yelling, demanding we tell them where you are.”
“The white colonel?” I asked. “Deer Voort?”
He nodded.
“We were on a mission. The colonel knows that,” I said.
“I tell them, but they not believe. Them very angry. Say you killed soldiers at Al-Kuul. The Professor’s soldiers.”
“What?” Tam exclaimed. “We killed SPLM men?”
Abdi nodded, tears and sweat dripping off his face. “The white colonel tell his men to take all your things. I tried to stop them, but they beat us. Chase posse away.”
“But when did you see Poet9, Abdi?” Tam asked. “When did he tell you about ‘catfood’?”
The boy heaved a deep breath, then composed himself. “One hour after the white colonel left. He met me in the bush, saying he watched it all on his drone.”
Shift Tense: Eshu International Book 2 Page 17