A Desert Called Peace cl-1

by Tom Kratman

  The signifer nodded agreement, then pointed to his watch. He held up the fingers of one hand, twice. Ten minutes?

  The Sumeri shook his head regretfully, once again sweeping around the square with one arm. Too many bodies… and our people are stretched.

  Agreeing, the signifer held up all the fingers of the same hand, and repeated the gesture four times. At this the Sumeri seemed happy… or as happy as one could be under the circumstances. He then flashed his five finger sign once again and made as if putting a pistol in his holster. Start the truce, officially, in five minutes. The signifer agreed.

  The Sumeri then made a sign as if drawing his pistol and firing it three times into the air. That will be the signal to resume.

  At this the signifer nodded, as well. Then both shook hands and walked back.

  Five minutes later, parties of legionaries and Sumeris warily entered the square, no weapons in evidence. They searched impartially for the wounded, of which there were a few. These the Balboans took away, irrespective of uniform. They could care for the wounded much better than could the Sumeris' poor medical staff. Moreover, while there was some advantage to making the Sumeris take their own wounded, to make them eat up the little food remaining, Carrera had ordered that starvation was not, in this case, to be used as a weapon.

  The dead were taken away by their respective sides, the Sumeri dead to a mosque that had been turned into a morgue not far away, the Balboans to another ad hoc morgue that had been set up in the gymnasium of a captured high school. All the dead were treated with the greatest respect by both sides.

  Both sides moved as briskly as exhausted men could be expected to. It was not quite briskly enough. Nearing the end of the truce the original Sumeri officer-lacking decent body armor, generally, they had many more dead to carry away-asked for another ten minutes, which was granted.

  Then, exactly thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds after the first white flag was shown, the bagpipes picked up, three well-spaced shots were fired into the air, and the slaughter resumed.

  The only way tanks could lead in city fighting was if there was no real fighting to be done, in other words, if the enemy was either nonexistent or worthless. With a brave and competent enemy, and Sada's boys had shown themselves to be that, it was generally suicide for armor to lead. In that case, and in this, infantry led while armor followed and supported at a distance, suppressing with machine guns or clearing the way with the main gun. They'd proven particularly useful in clearing streets of the mines and booby traps the Sumeris had laid down lavishly.

  The really bad part was that the streets made it impossible to use the armor in mass. Instead, one tank or sometimes two would be attached to one infantry century. Sometimes they'd have an Ocelot or two in support and sometimes not. In either case, though, when the rifle, sniper and machine-gun fire came in the crews had to button up and hope the infantry could keep the enemy's antitank teams away while the tank dealt with the threat that it sometimes couldn't really see very well.

  In the close confines of the town of Ninewa, and despite having quite good night vision equipment, Perez, del Rio and Mendoza just couldn't see very well, generally. Not having slept much in days didn't help, either.

  Still worse, they had no really good communications with the infantry century they were supposed to support. Their blasted antennae had been replaced; that wasn't the problem. Nor was it negligence on the part of the infantry. The grunts had simply lost so many leaders that a sergeant was leading the entire group with the senior section leader a mere corporal, and only one of those. The century had basically lost its ability to coordinate with their supporting tank.

  Even worse than that, this century was not the original one. The tanks were in such short supply, never more than sixteen to begin and four had been lost completely, that they had to shunt around from unit to unit.

  Neither Perez, nor del Rio, nor Mendoza could remember when they'd slept last. Mendoza thought he might have eaten something the day prior but couldn't be sure. The stewed camel over rice was not something the cohort mess section was really used to preparing, but they'd been reduced to that for the last three days. He might have skipped it yesterday; hard to remember. Too sleepy, too "Jorge, back up! Back up! Back up! Gunner, HE, RGL, two o'clock. Jorge, goddammit, back UP!"

  Still half asleep Mendoza automatically shifted gears and backed the tank fifty meters. Before he had gone that distance, though, a rocket-launched grenade lanced out from the half-shattered wreck of an adobe building. It missed the tank, barely, and exploded against a wall behind Jorge and to his left. The tank's automatic defense system hadn't fired because all the blocks on the front had been used up and there hadn't been any spares to replace them. Maybe tomorrow…

  Del Rio was apparently not half asleep since the main gun roared even before Jorge applied the brakes. That woke him up fully and in time to watch the adobe building to his right front disintegrate to dust.

  Ninewa, Command Post, Legio del Cid, 6/3/461 AC

  A Cricket's engine sputtered outside where it had come to a hasty landing just a few seconds ahead of a heavy machine gun's tracers. A short, dark, and stout man, chest still swathed in bandages, climbed painfully down from its high door.

  Parilla had to be helped into the building. The first thing he heard upon entering was Patricio Carrera, cursing a storm into a radio. "Listen carefully, you miserable son of a bitch. I said I want…"

  Parilla sat heavily and wearily in a folding chair inside. Outside the Cricket that had brought him had its tail picked up by four legionaries and turned to face away from the wind. Once loaded, it would taxi again and face into the wind for takeoff. Another pair of men, wearing white armbands with red crosses, loaded a stretcher in through the rear of the aircraft, then helped another legionary with his chest and shoulder heavily bandaged to climb into the front passenger seat. Loaded, the Cricket took off again in a cloud of propeller-raised dust. Behind the Cricket a NA-23 Dodo with "Lolita" painted on the nose waited patiently while more wounded either boarded or, if stretcher cases, were loaded.

  Carrera took one look and asked, "Raul, what the fuck are you doing here? You're still hurt."

  Parilla sighed and answered, "I couldn't stand it anymore, lying there while they brought in more and more wounded kids, most of them worse off than I was. So, one of the advantages of being Dux," and he emphasized the title as if to say, which means people do what I tell them to, generally, "is that when I say, 'I want to be flown to the front,' someone is going to bust ass to get me flown to the front."

  Carrera smiled. "I missed you, you old bastard. Things are not going all that well and we sure needed you here."

  "That's why I came, Patricio."

  "Are you up to running things from here?" Carrera asked.

  "Yes… with help," Parilla admitted.

  "Okay then. Let me show you how things stand." Carrera walked to the map and began to trace with his finger. "We've got about twothirds of the town, plus this airport," Carrera's head inclined in the direction of the Nabakov-23. "The Sumeris are still hanging on to the local university, backed up here against the river, and this corner." The finger showed the northeast area of the town, marked as being still in Sumeri hands. "This group didn't go into the school, by the way, to try to gain shelter by hiding in an off-limits target. They knew we wouldn't feel terribly restricted by that and sent a parliamentaire to assure us we could engage them there. They're only in it because it's all they have left."

  "Fighting strength is down" Carrera continued, "dangerously down. We've got nothing but MPs and walking wounded guarding prisoners and we've cannibalized the rear echelon for riflemen. Even so, average century rifle strength is only about three-quarters, more in some, less in others. That's even with the four hundred replacements fresh out of training that Christian rushed us from Balboa."

  Parilla raised a finger. "I can shed a little light and hope on the replacement situation. Another one hundred and fifty… ummm… fifty-four a
re due in day after tomorrow. And another one hundred and eighty or so in ten days."

  "That might help; the next contingent, I mean. If we haven't finished taking this place before ten days are up, I'll resign."

  Parilla inhaled deeply and, with obvious reluctance and distaste, said, "And that's another problem. The papers back home are howling for your head over these reprisals. Some of the politicos are, too. You haven't been up on international news here, have you?"

  "No, why?"

  "The Taurans are talking about putting out a warrant for your arrest from the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court."

  "Fuck 'em," Carrera answered, with no noticeable degree of concern.

  "Okay, just thought you might like to know. Anyway, I can handle things here." Parilla looked over the manning charts hanging on one wall. "Legate, you need to get forward to lead this legion."

  Carrera looked at the same charts, even as Parilla did. "Can you get by without a couple of the staff?" he asked.

  "Who did you have in mind taking?"

  "Rocaberti, Daugher, Bowman. Plus Mitchell and Soult. I had to shift Johnson to 3rd Cohort to replace its commander."

  "Where's Carl Kennison?" Parilla asked.

  "Here, Duce," Kennison answered unexpectedly from the door.

  Carrera raised a single eyebrow, which Kennison answered by saying, "I'll be fine for now, Pat. We can talk later, after the battle's over."

  Carrera nodded. "Fine. I'll be on my way then." He glanced around to make sure all five men he'd said he wanted to take were present. "You people I mentioned; on me in ten minutes, ready to rock."

  Manuel Rocaberti had done his level best to be as useful at headquarters as possible, hoping thereby to escape being sent anywhere but. He wasn't lazy, after all; he just wasn't too terribly brave. He'd learned that over a decade ago when, in the face of an FSC attack on Balboa he had run, deserting his men and his command. He'd have been shot, he knew, if his side had actually won. Fortunately, for him, they had not and in the chaos after the fall of Pina, the ex-dictator, no one had thought to prosecute him. Rather, no one in a position to had ever thought to. He was reasonably sure that Jimenez, among others, would have been glad to see him dead.

  Thus it was with a mix of relief and trepidation that Rocaberti found himself suddenly placed in command over an understrength infantry century with a single tank attached. The relief came from the fact that no one in the century or the cohort over it had any obvious reason personally to want Rocaberti dead. The trepidation came from the fact that the century was facing a large number of Sumeris who did want him dead, albeit only in an impersonal way. That was small comfort.

  Even so, Rocaberti was an experienced officer, an experienced commander, and well above the rank normally associated with the command of a single century. There was some good he could do. He began well enough, reorganizing the century and letting one badly overtasked sergeant become his assistant, rather than having the entire weight bearing down on the poor sergeant's own young shoulders. Then he'd seen to the supply situation, ensuring especially that more ammunition was ordered. Lastly, after talking amiably with some of the men, he'd set upon the cooks. There would be something better than boiled camel over rice this evening.

  IX.

  So many of Sada's officers were down that he was reduced to, if not quite leading charges himself, at least guiding the assault parties forward and giving them their final instructions. With another Sumeri commander, this sort of thing would have been expected and, as expected, such assaults would have petered out quickly once out of that stay-behind commander's gaze.

  Sada, by contrast, spent so much time at the front, and so much time exposed to enemy fire, that his men understood that if he stayed behind it wasn't in regard for his own safety, but in regard to the mission. They knew they weren't being sacrificed by a coward. That his reputation for this kind of conduct went back almost twenty years didn't hurt matters.

  The hardest thing for Sada to learn, this campaign, had been the effectiveness of modern night vision. In the Farsi War there had been little and what little there had been had been almost all on his side. In the Oil War of a dozen years before, while the enemy coalition had had a massive advantage, it hadn't affected him or his men much as they were in another part of the theater, killing Yezidis. They'd been bombed silly more than once, true, but night vision hadn't had a lot to do with it.

  Here though, the disparity was both gross and everywhere. The enemy had sights that would see through dust, through smoke, through walls. He'd lost a lot of men figuring that out. Now his men didn't try to restrict their movements to the night that the enemy owned. Instead, day or night they moved underground wherever possible, in tunnels-often no more than crawlspaces-that stretched from building to building and under roads and parks. Even where tunnels had not been possible, trenches were, and these helped shield Sada's men at least from the ground mounted thermal and light amplifying sights, if not from those loitering above, in the air.

  It was a hard-learned lesson: If the enemy owns the night, fight, where possible, in the day.

  So, ratlike, Sada and his soldiers moved in small groups, through trenches and tunnels, between buildings and under and across roads and parks before emerging, several hundred of them, in a series of apartment buildings still held by his side. The worst part was crawling through a trench that led across a children's park. Sada had fretted over that badly, finally ordering enough troops into five buildings that dominated the park so that any aerial recon could be driven off or shot down. At the end of the park, the trench went underground again, before turning left to enter several apartment building basements.

  In the apartment buildings' basements-named by Sada "Assault Position Ramadan"-too tired to be nervous over the possibility of aerial bombs or heavy mortar shells, Sada and his men slept the night, awaiting morning and their attack.

  And I must attack, at least often enough to keep the enemy from feeling secure enough to methodically peel us away like the shell from an egg, Sada thought, as he drifted off to fitful sleep.

  4th Cohort Command Post (Forward), 7/3/461 AC

  The Forward CP was wherever Jimenez happened to be, with a couple of radiomen, a forward observer team with another radio, and a few more soldiers detailed as security.

  It was just after midnight. Jimenez and his small party hunkered down behind some furniture hastily thrown up and then reinforced by sandbags, the whole mess being on the ground floor of a government building facing a broad and dusty open area. This had some children's amusements to suggest it had once been dedicated as a park.

  One would have to look twice, though, to see that now. The children's amusements were smashed, littered here and there with bodies, and the otherwise smooth and level fields of dust were pockmarked with shell craters. Further detracting from the image of playground were the long trench dug into the field and the barbed wire that was strung from end to end.

  Jimenez had reason to know the place was mined, too. Even if he might have forgotten, the grim light cast by the flickering flames of one of his Ocelots-immobilized by a mine and colanderized by rocket launched grenades-would have reminded him.

  At least we got the chingada crew out.

  Five apartment buildings, the center one of seven stories, flanked by two of six, with those flanked by two of five stories, dominated the open field. They were exactly the kind of unattractive and tasteless government housing projects one might have expected from any government involved in public housing; blank, featureless, concrete "machines for mass living" with all the humanity carefully excised.

  Their ugliness was even worse now-even more real-for it was from these that fire had poured down on Jimenez's men as they'd tried to cross without adequate armored support. It was from these that the RGLs had smashed one of the few armored vehicles Jimenez had available to him.

  Carrera had called, just after the last attack, asking if Jimenez couldn't somehow force the field and get a toehold on the build
ings opposite.

  "Patricio, there is no way I can get across on foot. We tried. We paid, too. If you've got a bright idea, let me know because I am fresh out."

  "Wait, out." The radio had gone silent then for half a minute. When Carrera had come back he'd said, "Yes, I've got an idea. It'll be dangerous, though, and it will take some time to set up, to coordinate between the artillery, the flyboys and the Cazadors. Say… between four and eight hours. Hang tight. I'll get back with you."

  The artillery wasn't a problem. Neither was getting half a dozen helicopters configured for a mixed infantry-gunship load. The problem was the Cazador Cohort.

  "They're spent, Jamie," Carrera said, looking around at a collection of not so much dispirited as simply bone-weary men. "For at least a day, more likely two days, they're just out of it. Sending them back in, in this state, would be murder."

  Soult had nothing to say to add to that. Instead, he simply asked, "What are you going to do about it?"

  "Something I'd really rather not," Carrera admitted. "Call the CP and have Colonel Ridenhour meet us here."

  Tactical Operations Center,

  731st Airborne Brigade, northwest of Ninewa

  Colonel Jeff Lamprey was frantic, frustrated and infuriated, his face beginning to match his flaming red hair. He paced the close confines of his tented command post, set up just out of range of 120mm mortars, lashing out at all who crossed his path. His headquarters troops tried to avoid him, as best they could.

  There was a low thrum from overhead. This, Lamprey hadn't heard before, at least on his side of the river. He left the tactical operations center, or TOC-a fancy name for a command post, stepping outside in time to see a crude and primitive looking aircraft on high, grasshopper leglike landing struts set down lightly less than one hundred meters away. The door to the plane had painted on it an armored knight with curved wings attached to his back armor and rising overhead.

  Lamprey, who had had a week to study the organization across the river recognized it as one of the Legio del Cid's light recon and command birds. He snarled.