Mboya gazed again at the long line of prisoners. He was unable not to imagine them as they would look in an hour’s time, after the Bordj had been searched and their existence was no longer a tool against potential holdouts. He could not have broken with the Way of his childhood, however, had he not replaced it with a sense of duty as uncompromising. Esa Mboya, Captain, G Company, Hammer’s Regiment, would do whatever was required to accomplish the task set him. They had been hired to pacify the district, not just to quiet it down for six months or a year.
Youssef ben Khedda had not left. He was still facing Mboya, as unexpected and unpleasant as a rat on the pantry shelf. He was saying, “No, there is one more thing you must do, as God wills, before you leave Ain Chelia. I do not compel it—” the soldier’s face went blank with fury at the suggestion—”your duty that you talk of compels you. There is one more traitor in the village, a man who did not enter the Bordj because he thought his false god would preserve him.”
“Little man,” said the captain in shock and a genuine attempt to stop the words he knew were about to be said, “don’t—”
“Add the traitor Juma al-Habashi to these,” the civilian cried, pointing to the fluttering jellabas of the prisoners. “Put him there or his whines of justice and other worlds and his false god will poison the village again like a dead rat stinking in a pool. Take him!”
The two men stood with their feet on a level. The soldier’s helmet and armor increased his advantage in bulk, however, and his wrath lighted his face like a cleansing flame. “Shall I slay my brother for thee, lower-than-a-dog?” he snarled.
Ben Khedda’s face jerked at the verbal slap, but with a wave of his arm he retorted, “Will you now claim to follow the Way yourself? There stand one hundred and thirty-four of your brothers. Make it one more, as your duty commands!”
The absurdity was so complete that the captain trembled between laughter and the feeling that he had gone insane. Carefully, his tone touched more with wonder than with rage until the world should return to focus, the Kikuyu said, “Shall I, Esa Mboya, order the death of Juma Mboya? My brother, flesh of my father and of my mother… who held my hand when I toddled my first steps upright?”
Now at last ben Khedda’s confidence squirted out like blood from a slashed carotid. “The name—” he said. “I didn’t know!”
Mboya’s world snapped into place again, its realities clear and neatly dovetailed. “Get out, filth,” he said harshly, “and wonder what I plan for you when I come down from this hill.”
The civilian stumbled back toward his car as if his body and not his spirit had received the mortal wound. The soldier considered him dispassionately. If ben Khedda stayed in Ain Chelia, he wouldn’t last long. The Slammers would be out among the stars, and the central government a thousand kilometers away in al-Madinah would be no better able to protect a traitor. Youssef ben Khedda would be a reminder of friends and relatives torn by blasts of cyan fire with every step he took on the streets of the village. Those steps would be few enough, one way or the other.
And if in the last fury of his well-earned fear ben Khedda tried to kill Juma—well, Juma had made his bed, his Way… he could tread it himself. Esa laughed. Not that the traitor would attempt murder personally. Even in the final corner, rats of ben Khedda’s stripe tried to persuade other rats to bite for them.
“Captain,” murmured Scratchard’s voice over the command channel, “think we’ve waited about long enough?”
Instead of answering over the radio, Mboya nodded and began walking the hundred meters to where his sergeant stood near the prisoners. The rebels’ eyes followed him, some with anger, most in only a dull appreciation of the fact that he was the nearest moving object on a static landscape. Troopers had climbed out of their gun pits all around the Bordj. Their dusty khaki blended with the soil, but the sun woke bright reflections from the barrels of their weapons.
“The search teams are ready to go in, sir,” Scratchard said, speaking in Dutch but stepping a pace further from the shackled Kaid besides.
“Right,” the captain agreed. “I’ll lead the team from Third Platoon.”
“Captain—”
“Where are the trucks, unbeliever?” demanded Ali ben Cheriff. His voice started on a quaver but lashed at the end.
“—there’s plenty cursed things for you to do besides crawling down a hole with five pongoes. Leave it to the folks whose job it is.”
“There’s nothing left of this operation that Mendoza can’t wrap up,” Mboya said. “Believe me, he won’t like doing it any less, either.”
“Where are the trucks to carry away our children, dog and son of dogs?” cried the Kaid. Beneath the green turban, the rebel’s face was as savage and unyielding as that of a trapped wolf.
“It’s not for fun,” Mboya went on. “There’ll be times I’ll have to send boys out to be killed while I stay back, safe as a staff officer, and run things. But if I lead from the front when I can, when it won’t compromise the mission if I do stop a load—then they’ll do what they’re told a little sharper when it’s me that says it the next time.”
The Kaid spat. Lofted by his anger and the breeze, the gobbet slapped the side of Mboya’s helmet and dribbled down onto his porcelain-sheathed shoulder.
Scratchard turned. Ignoring the automatic weapon slung ready to fire under his arm, he drew a long knife from his boot sheath instead. Three strides separated the non-com from the line of prisoners. He had taken two of them before Mboya caught his shoulder and stopped him. “Easy, Jack,” the captain said.
Ben Cheriff’s gaze was focused on the knifepoint. Fear of death could not make the old man yield, but neither was he unmoved by the approach of its steel-winking eye. Scratchard’s own face had no more expression than did the knife itself. The Kaid’s wife lunged at the soldier to the limit of her chain, but the look Scratchard gave her husband dried her throat around the curses within it.
Mboya pulled his man back. “Easy,” he repeated. “I think he’s earned that, don’t you?” He turned Scratchard gently. He did not point out, nor did he need to do so, the three gun jeeps which had swung down to fifty meters in front of the line of captives. Their crews were tense and still with the weight of their orders. They met Mboya’s eyes, comprehending but without enthusiasm.
“Right,” said Scratchard mildly. “Well, the quicker we get down that hole, the quicker we get the rest of the job done. Let’s go.”
The five tunnel rats from Third Platoon were already squatting at the entrance from which the rebels had surrendered. Captain Mboya began walking toward them. “You stay on top, Sergeant,” he said. “You don’t need to prove anything.”
Scratchard cursed without heat. “I’ll wait at the tunnel mouth unless something pops. You’ll be out of radio contact and I’ll be curst if I trust anybody else to carry you a message.”
The tunnel rats were rising to their feet, silent men whose faces were in constant, tiny motion. They carried detector wands and sidearms; two had even taken off their body armor and stood in the open air looking paler than shelled shrimp. Mboya cast a glance back over his shoulder at the prisoners and the gun jeeps beyond. “Do you believe in sin, Sergeant?” he asked.
Scratchard glanced sidelong at his superior. “Don’t know, sir. Not really my field.”
“My brother believes in it,” said the captain, “but I guess he left the Slammers before you transferred out of combat cars. And he isn’t here now, Jack, I am, so I guess we’ll have to dispense with sin today.”
“Team Three ready, sir,” said the black-haired man who probably would have had sergeant’s pips had he not been stripped to the waist.
“Right,” said Mboya. Keying his helmet he went on, “Thrasher to Club One, Club Two. Let’s see what they left us, boys.” And as he stepped toward the tunnel mouth, without really thinking about the words until he spoke them, he added, “And the Lord be with us all.”
The bed of the turbine driving Youssef ben Khedda’s car
was enough out of true that the vehicle announced its own approach unmistakably. Juma wondered in the back of his mind what brought the little man, but his main concentration was on the plug connector he was trying to reeve through a channel made for something a size smaller. At last the connector shifted the last two millimeters necessary for Juma to slip a buttonhook deftly about it. The three subordinate Techs gave a collective sigh, and Bog Muller beamed in reflected glory.
“Father!” ben Khedda wheezed, oblivious to the guard frowning over his powergun a pace behind, “Father! You’ve got to… I’ve got to talk to you. You must!”
“All right, Youssef,” the Kikuyu said. “In a moment.” He tugged the connector gently through its channel and rotated it to mate with the gun leads.
Ben Khedda reached for Juma’s arm in a fury of impatience. One of the watching Techs caught the Kabyle’s wrist. “Touch him, raghead,” the trooper said, “and you better be able to grow a new hand.” He thrust ben Khedda back with more force than the resistance demanded.
Juma straightened from the gun jeep and put an arm about the shoulders of the angry trooper. “Worse job than replacing all the fans,” he said in Dutch, “but it gives you a good feeling to finish it. Run the static test, if you would, and I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He squeezed the trooper, released him, and added in Kabyle to his fellow villager, “Come into my house, then, Youssef. What is it you need of me?”
Ben Khedda’s haste and nervousness were obvious from the way his car lay parked with its skirt folded under the front from an over-hasty stop. Juma paused with a frown for more than the mechanical problem. He bent to lift the car and let the skirt spring away from the fans it was probably touching at the moment.
“Don’t worry about that,” ben Khedda cried, plucking at the bigger man’s sleeve. “We’ve got to talk in private.”
Juma had left his courtyard gate unlatched since he was working only a few meters away. Before ben Khedda had reached the door of the house, he was spilling the words that tormented him. “Before God, you have to talk to your brother or he’ll kill me, Father, he’ll kill me!”
“Youssef,” said the Kikuyu as he swung his door open and gestured the other man toward the cool interior, “I pray—I have been praying—that at worst, none of our villagers save those in the Bordj are in danger.” He smiled too sadly to be bitter. “You would know better than I, I think, who may have been marked out to Esa as an enemy of the government. But he’s not a cruel man, my brother, only a very—determined one. He won’t add you to whatever list he has out of mere dislike.”
The Kabyle’s lips worked silently. His face was tortured by the explanation that he needed to give but could not. “Father,” he pleaded, “you must believe me, he’ll have me killed. Before God, you must beg him for my life, you mustl”
Ben Khedda was gripping the Kikuyu by both sleeves. Juma detached himself carefully and said, “Youssef, why would my brother want you killed—of all the men in Ain Chelia? Did something happen?”
The smaller man jerked himself back with a dawning horror in his eyes. “You planned this with him, didn’t you?” he cried. His arm thrust at the altar as if to sweep away the closed triptych. “This is all a lie, your prayers, your Way—you and your butcher brother trapped me to bleed like a sheep on Id al-Fitr! Traitor! Liar! Murderer!” He threw his hands over his face and flung himself down and across a stool. The Kabyle’s sobs held the torment of a man without hope.
Juma stared at the weeping man. There was something unclean about ben Khedda. His back rose and fell beneath the jellaba like the distended neck of a python bolting a young child. “Youssef,” the Kikuyu said as gently as he could, “you may stay here or leave, as you please. I promise you that I will speak to Esa this evening, on your behalf as well as that of… others, all the others. Is there anything you need to tell me?”
Only the tears responded.
The dazzling sun could not sear away Juma’s disquiet as he walked past the guard and the barricading truck. Something was wrong with the day, with the very silence. Though all things were with the Lord.
The jeep’s inspection ports had been latched shut. The Techs had set a pair of skimmers up on their sides as the next project. The civilian smiled. “Think she’ll float now?” he asked the trooper who had grabbed ben Khedda. “Let’s see if I remember how to put one of these through her paces. You can’t trust a fix, you see, till you’ve run her under full load.”
There was a silence broken by the whine of ben Khedda’s turbine firing. Juma managed a brief prayer that the Kabyle would find a Way open to him—knowing as he prayed that the impulse to do so was from his mind and not at all from his heart.
“Juma, ah,” Bog Muller was trying to say. “Ah, look, this isn’t—isn’t our idea, it’s the job, you know. But the captain—” none of the four Techs were looking anywhere near the civilian—”he ordered that you not go anywhere today until, until… it was clear.”
The silence from the Bordj was a cloak that smothered Juma and squeezed all the blood from his face. “Not that you’re a prisoner, but, ah, your brother thought it’d be better for both of you if you didn’t see him or call him till—after.”
“I see,” said the civilian, listening to his own voice as if a third party were speaking. “Until after he’s killed my friends, I suppose… yes.” He began walking back to his house, his sandaled feet moving without being consciously directed. “Juma—” called Muller, but the Tech thought better of the words or found he had none to say.
Ben Khedda had left the door ajar. It was only by habit that Juma himself closed it behind him. The dim coolness within was no balm to the fire that skipped across the surface of his mind. Kneeling, the Kikuyu unlatched and opened wide the panels of his altar piece. It was his one conscious affectation, a copy of a triptych painted over a millenium before by the Master of Hell, Hieronymous Bosch. Atop a haywain rode a couple. Their innocence was beset by every form of temptation in the world, the World. Where would their Way take them? No doubt where it took all Mankind, saving the Lord’s grace, to Hell and the grave—good intentions be damned, hope be damned, innocence be damned… Obscurely glad of the harshness of the tiles on which he knelt, Juma prayed for his brother and for the souls of those who would shortly die in flames as like to those of Hell as man could create. He prayed for himself as well, for he was damned to endure what he had not changed. They were all travellers together on the Way.
After a time, Juma sighed and raised his head. A demon faced him on the triptych; it capered and piped through its own blue snout. Not for the first time, Juma thought of how pleasant it would be to personify his own weaknesses and urgings. Then he could pretend that they were somehow apart from the true Juma Mboya, who remained whole and incorruptible.
The lower of the two drawers beneath the altar was not fully closed.
Even as he drew it open, Juma knew from the lack of resistance that the drawer was empty. The heavy-barreled powergun had rested within when ben Khedda had accompanied the search team. It was there no longer.
Striding swiftly and with the dignity of a leopard, Mboya al-Habashi crossed the room and his courtyard. He appeared around the end of the truck barricade so suddenly that Bog Muller jumped. The Kikuyu pointed his index finger with the deliberation of a pistol barrel. “Bog,” he said very clearly, “I need to call my brother at once or something terrible will happen.”
“Via, man,” said the Technician, looking away, “you know how I feel about it, but it’s not my option. You don’t leave here, and you don’t call, Juma—or it’s my ass.”
“Lord blast you for a fool!” the Kikuyu shouted, taking a step forward. All four Technicians backed away with their hands lifting. “Will you—” But though there was confusion on the faces watching him, there was nothing of assent, and there was no time to argue. As if he had planned it from the start, Juma slipped into the left saddle of the jeep he had just rewired and gunned the fans.
With an oath, B
og Muller grappled with the civilian. The muscles beneath Juma’s loose jellaba had shifted driving fans beneath ore carriers in lieu of a hydraulic jack. He shrugged the Technician away with a motion as slight and as masterful as that of an earth tremor. Juma waggled the stick, using the vehicle’s skirts to butt aside two of the younger men who belatedly tried to support their chief. Then he had the jeep clear of the repair rack and spinning on its own axis.
Muller scrambled to his feet again and waited for Juma to realize that there was not enough room between truck and wall for the jeep to pass. If the driver himself had any doubt, it was not evident in the way he dialed on throttle and leaned to bring the right-hand skirt up an instant before it scraped the courtyard wall.
Using the wall as a running surface and the force of his turn to hold him there, Juma sent the gun jeep howling sideways around the barricade and up the street.
“Hey!” shouted the startled guard, rising from the shady side of the truck. “Hey!” and he shouldered his weapon.
A Technician grabbed him, wrestling the muzzle of the gun skyward. It was the same lanky man who had caught ben Khedda when he would have plucked at Juma’s sleeve. “Via!” cried the guard, watching the vehicle corner and disappear up the main road to the mine. “We weren’t supposed to let him by!”
“We’re better off explaining that,” said the Tech, “than we are telling the captain how we just killed his brother. Right?”
There Will Be War Volume II Page 34