by Tom Kratman
"It is superb, Sheik. And it can only get better. This one heathen shipping company will be off limits, for a good price. But that doesn't reduce our righteous plundering. It only means we can concentrate on those who have not yet agreed to pay this maritime Yizya. This will increase the pressure on them to come to an arrangement with us. And each one that does submit increases the pressure on those who have not. One by one they will bow."
Abdulahi laid down a thick briefcase and opened it. Inside, Mustafa could see, were stacks of large denomination bills; Tauran lira, Federated States drachma, masu of Yamato, Volgan gold rubles, Helvetian escudi . . .
Mustafa felt tears begin to form. Abdulahi turned away, feigning not to notice.
"When here, in our darkest hour, you come to our rescue . . . " Mustafa began.
"Sheik, when my homeland was torn and my tribe starving, who came to our aid? You did. When the infidels occupied our land, who gave us the means and the encouragement to resist them? You did. Who built for us schools and hospitals? You did. This is a small repayment . . . with the promise of much more to come."
* * *
Later—after Abdulahi had been presented with a recently captured Tauran slave girl to take back with him to Xamar; a small token of Mustafa's appreciation and esteem—Mustafa had sat in his quarters for a long time stroking his beard and looking at the case of money while thinking upon the uses to which it could be put.
It's not that much really, a few million, five at most. I could almost weep for the days when the Ikhwan commanded hundreds of millions of FSD and thousands upon thousands of fighters.
This money is a start. It is also a suggestion. Along with the Xamari, I must think upon how to direct the seaborne mujahadin of Nicobar. Then again, they do not owe me as did Abdulahi and his people. Is it worth my time and effort to try to direct the Nicobars? Perhaps not. Can I make it worth their time and effort to support me? Perhaps so. It must be thought upon.
For now, I have the fight in Pashtia to worry about. And, even though I am a son of the Prophet, peace be upon him, I find I must worry, that I must not leave everything to Allah.
What a strange thought that is. The filthy Nazrani say that "God helps those who help themselves." How odd that this seemingly impious notion should infect me, and yet it may be so. I must set the mullahs to searching the Holy Koran and the Sacred Hadiths to see if this idea may be religiously supportable.
In any case, if it is not supportable, I do not know what is. Allah has turned his face from us everywhere we relied upon him too heavily. In Pashtia we were slaughtered in weeks. In Sumer, the holy warriors could not face the infidels. Millions have gone over to them, keeping only the shell and shadow of the Faith and none of its meat and drink. Perhaps Allah . . .
Mustafa sipped at qahwa, unsweetened coffee brewed from beans still green, and filtered through a piece of hemp rope stuck in the spout. There was a thought there, an important thought that had gone skittering away. Perhaps Allah . . . . what?
Perhaps this is another test of our faith in him? Perhaps. But . . . Aha! There is the thought. What if it is as much a test of His faith in us?
A serving boy, a slave but not a Tauran, bent to refill Mustafa's cup. The Emir of the Ikhwan stopped the boy by covering the cup with his hand.
"Go," he said. "Find and bring me Nur-Al-Din, the Misrani, and Abdul Aziz who helps manage the accounts. Bring me, too, Mullah al Kareem, that we might use his insight into the holy words. When that is done, brew more qahwa. It will be a long night.
16/10/466 AC, Training Area Thirty-Five, Isla Real
Leave was never quite "leave" when Carrera returned from the war. Rather, it was his opportunity to observe, direct and correct the training and administration taking place behind him.
There was only one moon up this evening, Eris, but she was full, casting sharp shadows on the ground. At that, Eris only provided perhaps twenty percent of the maximum illumination possible from Terra Nova's three moons.
Under that moonlight, battle-dressed and wearing night vision goggles, Carrera watched an infantry platoon from Fourth Tercio going through their paces in setting up a night ambush. It looked professional; it looked well-oiled. Yet something bothered him about it and he wasn't sure quite what.
"What's wrong with this, Jamey?" he asked Soult.
Soult shrugged. "No clue, boss. It looks fine by me."
"Yeah . . . yeah, that's it. It looks fine. How does something look that fine? When does real war ever look that fine? Let's go trip into the objective rally point, shall we?"
The two were challenged by the team left behind at the objective rally point, or ORP, with the platoon's rucksacks. That was fine, too, but not in a way that bothered Carrera.
"Don't tell anyone I'm here," he told the sergeant in charge. "I just want to watch for a bit."
The sergeant was obviously not happy about that. If his tribune, Cano, came back and found Duque Carrera waiting for him without his having been warned, there'd be hell to pay later on.
Carrera understood that. "Jamey," he said, "stick with the sergeant so that when his tribune comes to rip his balls off he can plead superior orders and no opportunity." Soult went and stood next to the sergeant while Carrera walked to the side of the ORP nearest the ambush and waited. With his goggles on, he could just make out the ambush position, though not the men in it who had all gone prone. He continued forward until he could make out the waiting legionaries, then stopped and went to one knee to watch.
Mannequins joined to each other and suspended from a cable strung tightly between two trees began to enter the kill zone, in single file, pulled by someone off to the right, somewhere. Carrera saw them move across at a walking pace, a pace a group of Salafis might well take up when they thought they were safe but had to get somewhere.
The target mannequins—there were twelve of so of them, Carrera thought—were fully in the target area when the entire scene was brightly, if momentarily, lit by the flashes of two directional mines. Carrera ducked his chin onto his chest against the backblast and the fragments.
There followed rifle and machine gun fire; dozens of weapons sending out streams of tracers into the jungle downrange. Mannequins began to drop to the ground as bullets found the inflated balloons within sandbags that held them to the cable overhead. The bullets pierced the balloons, collapsing them and letting them and their sandbags flow through the harnesses, detaching them from the overhead cable.
This continued for a minute before there was a whoosh as a star cluster launched into the sky. The ground was suddenly lit in a bright magnesium light. Carrera heard a whistle and then voice commands. Men began to move rapidly across the kill zone, shooting every mannequin once more in the head as it lay on the ground. Special teams searched the "bodies," collecting documents of intelligence value, communications devices, and weapons. The documents, cell phones and one radio were turned over to the platoon leader. A pile was made of the captured weapons, which pile a two-man team prepared for demolition.
At some point—Carrera presumed it was when the intel collection team reported to the platoon leader that the bodies were clear—another star cluster was launched. Men began to scurry back to the ambush line, even as the demo team shouted "Fire in the hole" and pulled the igniters that led to the charges they'd placed on the arms.
Once the demo team had cleared away, there was another whistle blast and, once again, the rifles and machine guns poured lines of death into the jungle opposite the ambush line. Voice commands followed and, by ones and twos the ambushing platoon began to form up to fall back to the ORP.
"It's too smooth," Carrera whispered.
* * *
Cano was pissed. Being taken by surprise, ambushed himself by the Duque, was just too fucking much. Bad enough that . . .
"Relax, Tribune," Carrera said, not ungently. He was actually impressed with the kid. "I just have some questions. It was a good ambush. Really. What bothers me was that maybe it was too good. Why do you t
hink it was so good?"
Cano didn't relax. Sure, he wasn't a signifer anymore; he was entitled to tie his boots in the morning without tying the left one to the right one. Even so, this was the bloody Duque. He was a bastard; everyone knew it. Cano could just see his career flying off to parts unknown and unknowable. He could . . .
"I asked a question, Tribune," Carrera reminded.
"Oh . . . sorry, sir. I was . . . I just wasn't expecting you to—"
"I asked a question, Tribune."
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Well . . . sir . . . we've done this ambush here maybe a dozen times just since I've been leading the platoon. The boys know what to do and, then again, we drill the shit out of it . . . "
Aha.
"Jamey! Call the Chief of Staff, the I and the Ia. I don't give a shit if they're asleep. Get 'em up."
17/10/466 AC, Main Officers Club, Isla Real
Normally, in every day life, Carrera was a surprisingly gentle sort. He wasn't particularly aggressive, or vicious. He'd probably never done a deliberately cruel thing, outside of line of duty, in his life.
In line of duty, however, or especially in action, he changed. The change wasn't like that of a man turning to a wolf; that kind of transition, even in myth, took time. Instead, for Carrera, there simply came a moment when stress impended and he changed.
It was something like a click.
"I'm so glad you could all make it," Carrera hissed to the assembled senior officers and centurions of the Legion.
As a single man, they thought, Oh, shit, we're in trouble.
"You people suck mastodon cock," Carrera began, with his usual fine sense of tact. "Where the fuck did you get the idea that your job is to train people to follow formulae, rather than training them, mentally and morally, as individuals and as units, to solve unique problems? You've been fighting for five fucking years now. When did you all forget that war is always different?
His face was livid as he continued, "Can anyone answer me; when did Cazador School begin training leaders to be robots? Hmmm? No takers? I see. Did it creep in in OCS or CCS? No?
"I watched an ambush the other night. Good unit, good leaders, conducting a good ambush. But you know what? They'd been doing the same thing in the same way in the same place for fucking years." With this he spared a glare for Kuralski and the staff. "Why have we had our soldiers doing the same fucking thing in the same fucking place in the same fucking way for years? Why didn't we give them different problems, in different places, with different circumstances? Why, you assholes? Why?"
It had taken Carrera thirty-six hours of brooding to become as angry as he was. He'd nurtured the anger, cultivated it, so that he could release it on his subordinates. Once released, though, it ebbed quickly enough.
"Now listen," he said, more calmly. "I'm going to explain something."
"Battle drills—preset solutions, well rehearsed, for common battlefield circumstances—are an interesting subject. Likewise for Standard Operating Procedures, individual tasks done to perfection, crew drills, and formations. There are some very good armies that depend on them. The Federated States and Volgan Republic do; and maybe the Foreign Military Training Group is where we were contaminated from. There are also some very good armies that loath them, the Sachsen and Zionis, for example.
"Generally speaking, I don't like them. There are a number of reasons for that. Listen, carefully."
The assembled leaders did listen carefully. They also relaxed to a degree; when Carrera went into teaching mode, they knew, he was unlikely to shoot someone on the spot. They knew he was going into teaching mode when he pulled some index cards out of his right breast pocket. When did Carrera need prompt cards to chew someone's ass?
"Number one, remember that drills, if they're going to be reliable, must be conditioned into troops, almost as if the troops were Pavlov's dogs. So if you can't really condition something well enough to rely on it, don't make a drill of it.
"Two, conditioning takes a lot of time, time you probably won't have. So even if something can, in theory, be conditioned, if you don't have the time to condition it, don't waste what time you have on the impossible.
"Three, drills—like everything else—take place under certain conditions. If those conditions are subject to radical differences such that no amount of practical drilling can condition them all, do not train as a drill something that will only be true infrequently.
"Four, military units suffer losses. They are almost never at full strength. If a drill requires a particular level of manpower or equipment, and you can reasonably predict that that particular level of strength will rarely be met, I would suggest you don't bother.
"Three and four are related in a way. We use crew drill for the tank and Ocelot crews, don't we? One thing about the inside of a turret; it doesn't change. The crewmen have seats they stay in. The gun doesn't move relative to the crew. The internal communications gear typically works. And the crew of an armored vehicle generally lives or dies together, no attrition that matters in the short term. So a drill for a crew like that makes sense. The same holds true for much that the mortars and artillery do. Their positions may change from place to place, but the important thing, the gun, is always the same. The positions they build to protect the gun and themselves are always the same, too. The casualties they take, mostly to other mortars and artillery, or air, tend to be either catastrophic or insignificant—the crew lives or dies together."
Carrera became reflective. "Actually towed artillery is a funny case. They don't usually come under small arms fire. Mines are only rarely a problem for them. For the most part they lose men to aerial attack and counter battery fire from enemy artillery. That fire either is close enough to emulsify the crew, or it's far enough away, when it explodes, to do only limited damage to the crew, or it is so far away it is irrelevant to the crew. In cases one and three, that the artillery crew was drilled numb doesn't hurt matters. It can still either do the job or it is dead. In the middle case, because gun crews are much larger than the bare minimum needed to load and fire the gun, and because artillery crew drill is so simple that everyone can be, and in a good crew is, trained to do all the jobs, even with some losses the gun can still fill the important jobs with adequately trained troops and function at a reduced rate of fire."
"However, compare the problem at the crew level to a platoon of mortars, tanks or tracks, or a battery of guns. They always have to adjust: to terrain, to the enemy situation, to their own strength. The variables for infantry are infinite, a few drills won't do and the number that might do is impossible. So, before you decide to train something as a drill, ask yourself also whether the conditions—to include your own strength—are likely to be the same in war. I'll give you a hint; a line remains a line, even when you erase some portion of it. If you plan on doing a drill or formation with any unit above the crew level, you had best consider making it some variable on a line . . . wedges and echelons count as lines. Only that kind of formation or drill is sustainable after losses.
"In a similar vein; formations. If you've ever seen a platoon, normally of four vehicles, trying to bound forward by sections of two vehicles, when the platoon is down to only three vehicles, you'll know what I mean. It just doesn't work the same way. You end up with either an inadequate covering force—one vehicle—or the covering force is two vehicles and the single track sent ahead to bound feels alone and abandoned and advances most reluctantly. So under normal combat conditions the bounding drill has less benefit than you expect and need and all the time spent on drilling such movement tends to be wasted. On the other hand, a company bounding forward by alternating its platoons can work because even if a bounding platoon has taken some losses, it is still capable of covering its own front and has enough sub units left to give each other moral support to go forward. That, by the way, is the single most important reason Legion tank platoons have six tanks instead of the usual four other armies have; so they can take losses and still have two sections capable of form
ing some variant on a line to cover themselves while they move forward by bounds.
Carrera flipped one of his prompt cards over. "Back to the main subject: Fifth, time to execute the drill in battle is another consideration. Some things don't have to be conditioned to be done. Even in battle there is often time to give more than one word drill commands. So ask yourselves, before deciding to do something as a drill, if there would normally be time to give orders to have your troops act more appropriately than a drill would allow.
"Sixth, is the drill a matter of life and death for an individual, victory or defeat for a higher unit? I don't mean simply that under some rare circumstances a well-executed drill might be life or death for us or the enemy. I mean is a precise response virtually always that important. Reaction to a near ambush is that kind of circumstance. So is using a bangalore torpedo to breach an obstacle, especially when attacking a position held by an enemy with a very responsive artillery support network . . . if surprise fails you and you must clear a path quickly. In those circumstances a simple, on line rush, drilled in advance, may be your best bet.