by John F. Carr
Experts at this kind of warfare, the Gurkhas kept their hand in by making sorties out after ‘dark’, which is a relative term with at least one of Haven’s three moons in the sky at all times. But the Mahdi forces’ belief in their invincibility and in Allah’s protection diminished when each morning produced another tentful of thirty men in mid camp, all with throats neatly sliced. Most of the Arabs attributed these assassinations to djinns. Daytimes the Gurkhas honed their kukhri knives in preparation for the next evening out.
“Sir!” Savage glanced up from paperwork that proliferated no matter how desperate the situation. The Commo sergeant was thrusting another flimsy at him. “Very weak signal, sir. Somebody tapped it out in Morse.”
Savage glanced at it and dashed through the connecting doorway to Falkenberg’s office. “The Seventy-seventh is still hanging in there,” he said.
“Right. Take care of it,” the Colonel said, and went back to his logistics tables.
Wadi in some dialects can mean a river but usually it refers to a dry watercourse or a valley floor. Wadi el-Murtadd acquired its name from a Cousin Jack whose fondness for an Arab woman deterred him from evacuating to Eureka during the first days of the Mahdi’s uprising. Finding himself painted into a corner, Jack Cornuell took the only recourse left and declared himself a Believer. Which created no crisis of conscience since he had never believed in Christianity or any other organized religion.
Even so, Jack would never have taken such a bold step had it not been for his hero and role model. Ian Hunnicutt was eight years older and thus more sure of himself. Not giving a fiddler’s fart for what the Cornish community might have to say, Ian had long since married a woman who was Jack’s wife’s older sister and lived, it seemed to Jack, in a far greater state of contentment than most of the Cousin Jacks who had stuck to their own kind. Ian had gone the whole route, was fluent in Arabic and prayed five times a day, twisting his neck in that painful and totally erroneous gibla vector.
Under normal circumstances his neighbors would have accepted Jack so long as he behaved himself and engaged in no public conduct deemed apt to frighten the horses. Jihad changed that. Although Muslims profess to respect the Old and New Testaments equally, they take exception to that Old Testament passage that refers to ‘those who piss against walls.’
Muslim men squat.
Jack Cornuell did not and one day when he thought he was unobserved let fly in an alley. Before his fly was zipped up he was surrounded by a mob of teenage boys jeering at his lack of circumcision. With the fanaticism of jihad in full swing one thing led to another and Jack found himself visiting the village barber at age forty-one instead of the usual Islamic ten-to-fourteen. Circumcision with a skilled practitioner and a sharp razor is not particularly painful, although the next few weeks can be a time for keeping tight rein on one’s fantasies.
Jack’s problem was different. The imam and other village dignitaries were witnessing the operation and the barber, with an understandable wish to appear enlightened and aware of modern hygienic techniques emptied a small bottle of iodine over the point of excision.
Up to this point Jack had endured his initiation into Islam with remarkable stoicism. But when the solution of alcohol and iodine hit the target area he hopped up and down and remarked, “Jaysus Fookin’ Christ!”
Silence spread like the wave from a stone flung into still water.
“Murtadd!” the imam gasped.
Under Sharia a backslider is allowed three days to repent and make a public declaration of faith in the nearest mosque. Unfortunately, the fanaticism of the day prevailed and the three-day grace period of Islamic law was ignored. Sentence was carried out immediately just outside the village. The unkindest cut for Jack was to see Ian among the men of the village who had gathered to stone him to death on the spot which came to be called Wadi el-Murtadd.
ELEVEN
THE MAHDI’S FIELD piece had been laid in Wadi el-Murtadd to fire into Eureka. Expecting retaliation, the villagers had made themselves scarce even before General Parker and the Seventy-seventh had come charging out here. The field piece was also gone now but its tracks were evident through the sandy patches that separated harra as the Arabs call lava tongues.
“Secure the area,” General Parker gasped at the surviving senior officer of the Seventy-seventh.
“What’s to secure, sir? There’s nothing here.”
“Will be when I…huff-puff…bring prisoners.”
“You’re going up that wadi without checking out topside?”
“Enough insolence… I know what I’m doing.”
Captain Spoto saluted with an inward shrug. There was nothing to secure.
Probably the General had decided it was such a piece of cake that his own people need not share any glory with this shattered regiment. As Shafter Parker and the bulk of the armor tore off up the narrowing wadi after the Mahdi’s gun, Spoto put the Seventy-seventh to digging in. If his instincts did not misinform him, the General was liable to come tearing out of that nascent box canyon even faster than he went in.
In the distance Captain Spoto heard the whoosh of a SAM and an instant later an explosion. “One less chopper,” a black sergeant observed as a column of black smoke rose. “I hope that muther-effin’ general was in it.”
The irregular popping of small arms ammo burning up masked the sound of the next two SAMs but black smoke suggested that another hundred men were going to have to walk home—if they were still alive. Spoto tried to raise Fort Camerone but the General’s breathless demands for rescue filled the air. No use asking for help until the parkerhouse roll was either killed or lifted out. At least he wasn’t asking the Seventy-seventh to step into the same trap. And Captain Spoto was beyond the age of volunteering. “Dig deep,” he yelled. “We may be here for a while.”
Wadi el-Murtadd was sixty klicks from Eureka. The Seventy-seventh had marched greater distances nonstop but not when they were exhausted, understrength, and still recovering from the pasting they had taken before Falkenberg’s arrival. In any event, if they were to step out onto the open desert at this moment, the Mahdi’s pursuing forces would take care of any not run over by the general in his rout.
On schedule, wheeled vehicles and two remaining choppers came back down the wadi, raising so much dust that the rear half of the column was taking relatively few casualties. Unfortunately, their retreat was blocked by the vanguard which was catching hell from riflemen, machine gunners, and rocketeers up on the escarpment. Nearing Wadi el-Murtadd where the Seventy-seventh was dug into the relatively lower hillside, the stragglers finally had enough space to get around the wrecked and blazing vanguard. Nobody stopped. Not even a farewell wave for the Seventy-seventh.
The pursuing Arab force knew they were there even though Captain Spoto had given it the old college try by ordering his men not to fire first. A couple of hundred camel-mounted goumiers peeled off from the Mahdi’s main column and dismounted. Grudgingly, Spoto gave them marks for courage when they began inching up the slope across sand and harra—and not a single rock or bush for cover!
“Hold your fire,” he called. “Whites of their eyes.”
“Bet them muthur effers can see the whites of my eyes,” the sergeant grunted as he released the safety.
The Arabs, used to the Haven militia’s hunting rifles, had not expected men with automatic weapons. At the first shot they rushed. The Seventy-seventh’s men responded with traversing fire from two light machine guns and something over a hundred automatic rifles. Fifty of the Mahdi’s men went down in the first seconds before they realized their mistake and scuttled downhill to regroup. Spoto’s men took two wounded and two dead. They used the interval to dig in deeper.
“Wonder if they got General Blockhead yet?” the sergeant said to no one in particular. There was always the chance that the airborne portion of the general’s party, at least, might outrun them the full sixty klicks back to the fort. But judging from past experience, those on the ground would take haras
sing fire every centimeter of the way, thanks to the Mahdi’s scattered Bedouin allies.
The Arabs in front of Spoto’s position did not try coming up the slope again. Instead, they spread wide to both sides and began climbing to come at them downhill from behind. The Seventy-seventh’s men began rearranging the rocks around the rims of their foxholes. They were still outnumbered and an Arab charge downhill would pack considerably more momentum. “No more whites of their eyes,” Spoto said. “Just conserve ammo.”
He turned the radio on again and listened. There was surprisingly little static. He pressed the battery condition indicator button and swore.
“Does anybody have live batteries?” he called.
Nobody did.
Some expert had covered the radio up instead of leaving it out in the sun to charge. Still expressing himself fluently, Spoto placed it flat beside his foxhole and began building a protective wall of stones around it. All he needed now was a stray bullet.
The Arabs kept sniping away. Once in a while a sniper got careless and a Marine put an end to his career. The sun went down, leaving the wadi bathed in the bluish light of two of Haven’s three moons. The Arabs gave up on sniping and turned to heaving grenades, then gave that up in short order when the marines picked them off with IR scopes.
“Go’m be a loooong night,” the sergeant observed.
With morning the radio reception was a little better but Spoto knew he’d be back on square one if he tried to transmit. After listening for news of the general and hearing nothing he put it back down to charge. “How’s the water holding out?” he asked.
“’Nuff maybe for one mo’ day,” the Sergeant said. During a morning of sporadic sniping Spoto occupied himself with propping the radio’s photovoltaic panel to the optimum angle, constantly shifting it to follow the sun. Finally, with the sun just touching the flat horizon of the New Gobi he positioned the radio to catch the last rays and touched the ‘transmit’ button.
Immediately the ‘battery condition’ needle dropped into the red. There was no hope of punching a signal through to the fort. Then he realized there might be a way. He turned up the gain all the way, began a high-pitched nasal whine into the mike, and began keying it on and off, transmitting Morse code.
An hour later the Arabs packed it in and disappeared when they saw the dust plume of a rescue column approaching.
“Any idea what happened to the general?” Spoto asked the fuzzy-cheeked corporal who piloted the hovercraft.
“Thought he was with you, sir.”
“Hmm.” Spoto was puzzled. If the Mahdi’s forces had caught a general they would have wasted no time to advertise the fact by catapulting his head into Eureka. But…this was the general who had handed the beaten Mahdi a victory on a silver platter. Maybe the Mahdi was grateful.
On the way back, to avoid a small cyclonic dust storm, the rescue column took a slightly different route and found the burned-out remains of General Parker’s force. There were mutilated and burned bodies in stinking profusion but none possessed the general’s bulk. Spoto wondered if he was being held for ransom or torture and realized he didn’t much care.
The day after Jack Cornuell was stoned to death in Wadi el-Murtadd, Ian Hunnicutt was in the village coffee house drinking the sickeningly sweet mint tea taken by those who cannot afford coffee, when a tall broad man with a bushy-red beard that covered most of his face, and in full desert regalia with agal and kuffieh approached. “Es salaam aleicum,” the stranger said.
“And to thee also peace,” Ian replied.
The stranger made a two-coffees gesture to the man at the huge brass machine and seated himself across from Ian. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
Ian raised his eyebrows and spread his hands.
“That we always wish peace upon one another, yet we are in constant war.”
“It is all in God’s hands,” Ian said with the shrug that is so much a part of Arab life.
“Your neighbors vouch for your loyalty.”
“They are most kind.” Ian was still heartsick over what he had been forced to do yesterday.
“Your eyes are blue. You speak the language of the giaour.” Ian braced himself. In times like these there was only one way this conversation could lead.
“You will leave the village,” General Barbarossa said. “You will enlist in the Haven Volunteers and keep us informed of the enemy’s movements and plans.”
“And who will feed my wife and my children?”
“They will be taken care of.” Barbarossa’s already stern face turned glacial. “One way or another.”
TWELVE
APART FROM needlessly expended supplies and wasted lives, the Haven campaign was only slightly behind where it would have been if General Parker had not—
Jeremy Savage threw his pencil to the pisé de terre floor of his office in Fort Camerone and stamped it to splinters. All the wasted lives…Captain Hawes, Captain Yeovil—the list went on and on. And it was all so unnecessary. If only that pig’s bladder of a general could have been delayed another fortnight the war would have been over. Now both sides licked their wounds and prepared for the next round.
And what was the status of the Seventy-seventh? General Shafter Parker was missing, presumably dead, but the evil men do lives after them. The Forty-second had mutinied. And Captain Savage had led that mutiny. How many messages had the general and his toadies gotten off before Falkenberg’s forces regained control of communications?
Meanwhile the Mahdi was having his own problems. To recruit volunteers is never easy. To recruit when one is losing approaches the impossible. The communications experts who had handled his liaison with Levant were all dead and the Mahdi and his Sirdar were equally ignorant of the cause of their difficulties. Maybe the comm equipment was broken down. Maybe the planetary authorities of Levant had decided to stop whipping a dead horse. Nobody knew. The Mahdi’s forces were making-do with those few heavy weapons they had been able to capture from the Seventy-seventh.
Inside Eureka and Fort Camerone several surviving toadies of General Parker intrigued with ceaseless transparency to gain access to radios and comm lasers. Falkenberg had changed the codes and now only he, Jeremy Savage, and Brent Myers knew the magic words that could punch through the ionosphere. The orbiting Adamant had maintained radio silence while ignoring Parker’s orders to return to Ceres.
Everyone from Colonel Falkenberg down to the most recent recruit knew the general’s men were walking time bombs. Since the general’s men made no effort to accommodate to new realities, everyone was equally determined that those time bombs must be detonated in a safe place.
Meanwhile, the war…
The Mahdi had given up on his first base camp and had found another spot with a fairly shallow well at the base of the Girdle of God Mountains and was building up his forces at the headwaters of Hahr el-Owwahl. The narrowness of the valley and mountains on both sides gave some protection from suborbital bombing.
The Mahdi’s problems were many. He needed more men, more food and water, more arms and ammo, and more transport. For the latter he had one hovercraft, a couple of helicopters in doubtful condition and pilots of even more doubtful ability. The remainder of his transport was oxen and camel. Falkenberg’s scorched earth policy and well-fouling had put Eureka at a near-impossible distance for his main forces.
The traditional Bedouin ability to live off the land was also strained. Neither they nor their flocks could survive without water. But the colonel’s capping of the wells and springs and the DMD Company’s destruction of their traditional pasturelands had, at the very least, forced them into the Mahdi’s camp. The Sirdar used them as often as he could for hit-and-run raids.
Colonel Falkenberg had inventoried mining machinery after the managers had seen the fallacy of General Parker’s order to reopen. After the Mahdi’s initial attacks most of the mining machinery at Golconda had been packed up and ferried down the Isis to safety in Eureka. There any number of machines that could be ada
pted to tunneling or knocking down walls and he thanked god that the Mahdi’s sappers had not the imagination to see their utility. There was nothing to serve Falkenberg’s needs.
The Colonel spoke the code word and, with Major Brent Myers standing by, asked Captain Kraft of the Adamant to bring a load of dune buggies next run.
Myers was detailing the armament and other equipment he wanted mounted on these unarmored vehicles when a pudgy man in corporal’s uniform dashed into the room and grabbed the mike. “Mayday!” he shouted. “Mutiny!”
Between Mayday and Mutiny Falkenberg jerked the mike cord and the jack pulled free of the transmitter. Thus neither Mutiny nor the two rapid rounds Major Myers put into Parker’s lackey’s chest were ever heard aboard the Adamant.
“Sounds like trouble down there,” Captain Kraft observed.
Falkenberg plugged the mike jack back in. “Came in over the field frequency,” he said. “Sounds like one of our patrols is in trouble.”
“Well, I won’t waste any more of your time. Over and out.”
“One less,” Myers said as he holstered his weapon.
“One less,” Falkenberg agreed.
“How many more of Parker’s toadies are going to try to do the same thing?” the Major asked.
“If I were an optimist I’d say this man’s funeral might deliver a signal.” But the Colonel had never been an optimist.
* * *
Food was scarce on Haven. Even the pigs were long gone. Local steppe vegetation was edible but far from tasty and offered scant protein. Sooner or later everyone with a car, a truck, a hovercraft, or any other means of transportation gravitated toward the single petrocarb synthesizer in Eureka. Those who wished to leave Eureka were welcome to do so but Falkenberg made sure their vehicles stayed behind.