War World: Jihad!

by John F. Carr

  “Haas bu!” he yelled.

  It was a parachute. Day-glow green contrasted with the pink-tinged sky of Haven, rendering the chute clearly visible as it descended gently through motionless air.

  “I do not like this,” the head missile man said. “They want us to know it is coming.”

  “I know one kind of weapon that comes down on parachute to give the airplane time to get away from the blast,” Jarfi said.

  “Haas bu!” he yelled again and began beating an alarm triangle. Within minutes the twenty thousand people in the Mahdi’s camp were spreading across the flat in all directions, some running, some crawling, some riding camels and mules, the more foresighted having raided the scant motor pool. The day-glow green chute was twice as big and those afoot knew with sickening certainty that they would not be far enough away from ground zero by the time it reached detonation altitude. Some resigned themselves to the mercy of Allah but most kept on running.

  Slow as an hour hand, the chute continued descending until Jarfi realized it was well below detonation altitude—unless it was an extremely small bomb. He was better than two kilometers away from where it would probably land and, he thought, slightly upwind if this faint drift could be called wind. Around him people lay exhausted and gasping, some struggling to chant prayers, others waiting with oriental resignation.

  Jarfi kept on moving but he was no longer running. He was gasping in the thin air; it felt as if he were drowning. He couldn’t get enough oxygen into his blood stream. His heart was thumping against his chest, and he took in big gulps of air until his head began to swim. When he could stand, without falling over, he rose up to follow the parachute.

  There was a slight unevenness to the plain but he could almost see the spot where it was going to land. He wished for goggles. He wished he was somewhere else. Then to his astonishment the day-glow chute began to collapse. The bomb was on the ground!

  All that night and morning they waited. Jarfi felt a grudging admiration for whomever had put the device together. He had thought death undesirable enough. Waiting, he now knew, was worse. Toward the afternoon of the long eighty-seven-hour Haven day opinion was evenly divided. Was it still ticking away, or was it a dud?

  There was only one way to find out.

  Jarfi had always paid religion a decent respect, but until the Mahdi’s Jihad brought matters to a head he had never thought deeply about it. With the facile cynicism of youth it struck him as an old man’s way to exploit the young while scaring the hell out of them. Therefore it was with mild amazement that he saw an imam trudging back toward ground zero.

  It took the old man nearly half an hour to get back to where the bomb had landed. The Mahdi’s followers waited in tense silence. No explosion came. Instead they heard a grating shriek of unadulterated fury just before the old man began clanging the all-clear.

  By the time Jarfi got back into position the Mahdi had beaten him there in a truck. Standing on the flat bed in blazing sun, the Mahdi spoke into a bullhorn. “It is the body of one of our brave soldiers,” he roared, “sewed inside a dead pig!”

  Twenty thousand Faithful stood in breath-holding silence and Jarfi sensed the same emotions in himself that had to be running through all of them. They had all tried pork at one time or another and Allah had not stricken them dead. But yesterday they had panicked, not from the hard radiation of God’s anger but—from a dead pig. In the mad, every-man-for-himself scramble valiant warriors had shamed themselves before their women, before their Mahdi, before their god.

  Most unendurable was that the Giaours must have known they would panic. To foul wells with pig carcasses was outrage enough. To wrap a dead soldier inside an unclean animal was more than outrage. It was an act of supreme contempt. Slowly fury began building until men dared not speak, knowing they would chitter with rage like Chacma baboons.

  The Mahdi paused, as if he were gauging the mood of the crowd. Still silence. He was just opening his mouth when the antiphon finally came from twenty thousand throats. “Death to the infidel!” they chanted.

  All things considered, Jarfi was in favor of that. But he suspected the Mahdi was not. To ignore an outrage like this could destroy the cause. People would forget about Jihad and try to pick up the threads of their ordinary lives. The Mahdi would have to do something quickly. And he was not ready. As a missile man Jarfi knew how pitifully short they were of ammunition—short of everything except enthusiasm. He wondered whether the CD was blocking Levant shipments or if those shysters were just playing some game of their own. It made no difference now. Ready or not, the Mahdi had to attack.

  EIGHT

  “FOR ONCE I see that rumors actually seem understated,” Savage said as he and Captain Kraft had a preprandial whiskey.

  “The man is a fistulated anus,” Kraft agreed.” And sponsored by a political enemy of my father so I’ve no reason to suffer fools gladly.”

  “Do you know Colonel Falkenberg?” Savage asked.

  “Only by reputation. He seems competent.”

  “General Parker seems to know him.”

  “Oh, dear! Falkenberg’s going to have enough on his hands without that multiple-thumbed hack stirring around.”

  “If news travels no faster than the first ship—I don’t know how they could have learned it—but apparently the Haven situation is totally snafu and this batch of experts is heading out to win the war and court-martial the colonel. Probably totally untrue but they’ll make it true.”

  “I wonder if there’s anything I could do that wouldn’t backfire,” Captain Kraft said. They were both still searching for a solution when the Adamant went into orbit around Haven.

  * * *

  Jarfi Danb knew it was insane but he was the least senior member of a five man SAM battery and his opinion was seldom sought. Perched atop three of their seven rockets which were in turn perched on a one-hump dromedary camel, he struggled to ignore the rolling gait that was rapidly provoking some kind of a gastric crisis. Until he met the Mahdi, Jarfi had never mounted one of these splay-footed beasts; nor had he seen a camel as hairy as these cold-weather relations to the more familiar Dromedary camel.

  The noncombatants stayed behind in the Mahdi’s base camp but every fighting man was on the move. Some bore yataghans, others carried sabers or machetes. Several Bedouin groups carried antique black-powder jezails with short stocks and barrels as long as their owners. Many of these muskets had silver inlay along the length of the barrel. Other units had modern automatic weapons, probably bought from Levant traders at a fifteen hundred percent markup.

  Near the rear of the column the Mahdi and his staff crept along in the few cars and trucks they possessed. Ahead and behind the Mahdi’s party straggled infantry with camel-mounted outriders on each flank. Forward rode the remainder of the cavalry, some on fast mehari one-humps, others on mules and donkeys, and a few of the Blessed on horses, which would probably die long before the eight hundred kilometer trek to Golconda was finished. Ahead of them all on point duty was the five man SAM crew of which Jarfi was junior.

  “You have the best and fastest camels,” the Sirdar had said. “As long as you’re heading in the general direction of south let them have their head.”

  Being a city boy, Jarfi had supposed this had something to do with finding the easiest path through the malpais of volcanic boulders that now covered the valley floor.

  “If there’s water they’ll smell it,” the head missile man explained.

  All the first day the camels deviated only slightly from the vector that would put them in Golconda, where the Company mines were located. Nearing noon of the second day, with the first of the Mahdi column barely visible in the distance and strung out over ten kilometers, Jarfi’s camel made a left turn so abrupt that it had trotted half a klick off the destined path before he regained control. When he had time to look around all seven camels had also turned to follow. In spite of hauling back on their jerk-lines and exercising the sort of vocabulary for which Arabic is justly f
amous, the camels were all trotting.

  Suddenly Jarfi’s stopped, coming up so short that he continued on over its bent-down neck to land on a fly-blown gelatinous pile of rotting pig guts. His camel kicked them aside with one dinner-plate sized hoof and began drinking where water seeped from a crack in the cap rock.

  Jarfi struggled to wipe off the foul slime with handfuls of the coarse grass that had sprung up downstream. The only thing he accomplished was several bad cuts from trying to tear the razor-edged grass loose.

  “Now you know why they’re called blades of grass,” the older men explained. Having grown up in various oases back on Earth the others were much amused by Jarfil’s city ways and his total ignorance of commonplaces such as how to saddle a camel.

  “How long will it take to get there?” he asked when his hands were bandaged and the supper pita bread browning over a dung fire.

  “Ten days if they all went as well as today,” the leading SAM handler said.

  “But it won’t.”

  “Feet get sore, shoes wear out, people and animals stray, get sick and… Did you count how many people ignored the pig fouling and filled water bags here?”

  Discipline was breaking down already.

  The distant shriek of ‘Salaati!’ called the camp to prayers and conversation broke off as they spread rugs and prostrated themselves in the neck-breaking and totally spurious Mecca vector which is called gibla and pronounced with an initial consonant that originates somewhere below the tonsils.

  On the third day, and still seven hundred short of their eight hundred kilometer goal, the flat narrowed to less than a kilometer with jagged volcanic upthrusts to one side and a ravine that had probably once carried water part of the year on the other. Jarfi and the rest of the SAM team had gotten through and were relaxing, waiting for the clot of jammed people, pack animals, and vehicles behind them to thread their way through the bottleneck.

  If Jarfi had had his way about it, they would have proceeded on far enough to set up camp for the night and settled down. But the crew leader was adamant about not moving. Then abruptly Jarfi’s young ears told him why.

  “Mistágill!” he yelled. “Hurry up, they’re coming!”

  The team had practiced setting up their surface-to-air stovepipes countless times, but the half-tamed camels were in no mood to cooperate. By the time they had roped the beasts and unceremoniously tied them down with pegs, the jets had carpet-bombed the narrows. From his vantage point a half-klick away Jarfi had watched in awed terror as animals and people were flung sky high in the moment before the whole valley floor erupted in a huge napalm blaze. Suddenly the SAM crew took off running when one marine jet on the return run sprayed them with bullets. Camels bubbled and shrieked, trying madly to escape their ties. One man stumbled and fell spread-armed into a bloody pile of his own insides.

  Tearing his hair as he wept and shouted curses, the crew leader vented his fury on a downed camel’s belly. Then they went back to see what they could do for the survivors.

  The Mahdi’s personal vehicle had been blown up. In a tent beside the flatbed truck in which he would travel from now on he reviewed casualty figures. “Ten percent,” Barbarossa reported.

  “They died in Jihad,” the Mahdi said unnecessarily, “Therefore their souls will rest in eternity on the right hand of Allah.” With the serenity of true faith he was not overly concerned with the dead, who were mostly camp followers and could be counted on only to slow down the march. What really bothered him were two other things: the ease with which the CoDominium had struck without suffering a single casualty and the probability that it would happen again. How many times could he let it happen before jihad dissolved into disillusion?

  By now the Mahdi had experienced enough sobering second thoughts to know he should never have allowed himself to be maneuvered into this hopeless position. Town Arabs and Bedouin were already at each other’s throats. But things had gone too far to kiss and make up with the Company. The only way he could go now was straight ahead. Another seven-hundred kilometers would put them at the head of the Isis which might be navigable—if he could find materials for rafts or boats around the mines and abandoned wharves. But those pig-obsessed Marines had probably refreshed the river’s taint of pig offal….

  * * *

  “Filthy job but it seems to be working,” Major Brent Myers said. “They’re still bunched up about a five or six days march from Golconda and having one hell of a time with water. And I put enough garbage in plain sight to gag a maggot.”

  Colonel Falkenberg worried. He could feel a faint sympathy for the Mahdi, who could not be entirely stupid. But then he had spent most of his career cleaning up other people’s messes. If the man wished to promulgate a fanatical religion he had to accept what came with the territory. The danger at the moment though, was that the Pig Plan was working too well. Falkenberg wanted the Mahdi’s forces concentrated where he could keep his electronic eyes on them. If ever this Jihad dispersed into hundreds of feuding, raiding, every-man-for-himself bands, Haven would never be pacified. He sighed and said, “I believe it’s time to activate Plan B.”

  Major Myers whistled. “They’re only fifty klicks away. Probably some scouts are closer. We’ll have to be quick.”

  “Take as many people as you need.”

  “On my way, sir.” Myers saluted and was gone.

  * * *

  “Allahu Akbar!” Jarfi shouted. As usual his diminished SAM team was on the point, and first to discover the expected desecration of the Isis headwaters at the base of the Girdle of God Mountains. At the moment this did not concern them.

  “Truly, God is Great,” the chief echoed. The Golconda mines had appeared abandoned when they sighted the head frame, but booby traps at water holes had taught them caution. Finally, after half a day of cautious probing they were inside the huge building that housed rusting ore-crushing machinery at one end while the other seemed a warehouse.

  Inside the warehouse were stacked several hundred of the inflatable rafts with which ore concentrate had been floated down the Isis to the Eureka smelters. All that remained was to find an unpolluted water source and clear a launching site, then they could float the rest of the way to Eureka, portaging the rafts across the shallows that had appeared in the Isis ever since the Company began pumping.

  By mid-afternoon the bulk of the column had caught up. The Mahdi’s staff consulted maps and, realizing this place was probably zeroed-in, decided to embark immediately instead of waiting till some satellite could indicate their concentration and send another strike. With no clouds or rain this time of year, it would not be dangerously dark along this slow-flowing river. As the last of the Faithful boarded the last raft a single rocket overshot, reassuring the Mahdi’s staff of the rightness of their move when it blew up against the side of a tailings dump.

  * * *

  “Looks good.” Falkenberg was studying the picture transmitted in the instant before the rocket hit, appreciating detail that could not be gotten with higher-orbiting satellites.

  “Too bad we can’t give them a good saturation bombing while they’re bunched up,” Major Myers said.

  “This early in the game they’d scatter in all directions,” the Colonel replied. “But let’s see how things look when they get here, and here—too close to change their minds.” He indicated a couple of places on the map where the Isis had fallen sufficiently to expose kilometer-long portages over smooth, round, stream-polished stones that would make for strained tempers and sprained ankles. The nearest of these bone breakers was a scant four kilometers upstream from Eureka.

  It went off like clockwork. The Mahdi’s horde floated unmolested down the Isis for five days, troubled only by an occasional rocket that never seemed to fall short or to hit, but always passed high over the camp before exploding. The Faithful were nervous at the first portage and strung out along the riverbanks until they would have been dangerously exposed to anyone up on the hills to each side of the river. But they got throug
h unscathed.

  Half of them got through the last portage, practically in sight of Eureka, and then iron began raining down: heavy artillery shrapnel, recoilless, mortars, rockets—every imaginable infernal device poured down on the unfortunate Faithful who were still caught in the portage as Falkenberg’s forces used up a month’s worth of heavy ordnance in four hours.

  Those ahead of the barrage could not go back into certain death to help their fellows. Half of the remainder of the Mahdi’s force died in that four-hour barrage. Suffused with equal parts of rage and terror, those who had gotten out ahead of the barrage tried to climb the riverbanks and learned there were people up there among the poplars who didn’t want them to. With nowhere else to go, they set off to complete their appointed mission: destroy the Infidel at Eureka.

  “Starting out with half-million effectives,” Captain Lucius Hawes explained to his messmates at Fort Camerone, “the Mahdi is probably down to two hundred thousand by now. A lot of them are Bedouin and scattered all over the planet. Logistics won’t let him support more than twenty—at best twenty-five thousand at his base camp. And since bombs are no respecters of person, the quality of his troops will be little different now from what it was before our allies, sickness and napalm did their work. Against two hundred thousand we have one battalion of Gurkhas and will soon have the whole regiment. We already have forty-two hundred in the Forty-second, twelve hundred left of the Seventy-seventh, and some five-thousand in the Cousin Jack militia, for a projected total of just over fifteen thousand. Ten thousand of these are experienced troops—.”

  Conversation ceased at the sound of a bugle blowing “General Quarters.”

  “This,” Colonel Falkenberg pronounced, “is probably it.” Everyone hurried from the mess, grabbing helmets and sidearms from shelves near the doorway as they rushed to battle stations.

  In the noncom field mess down in Eureka Sergeant Major Calvin was putting it slightly differently. “Sure they outnumber us,” he said, “But now it’s only sixteen to one instead of sixty-two to one.”