by Tom Kratman
One of those servants poured now for the three person hiring committee tasked with sorting out the right kind of people from the mass of aspirants.
"Goldstein won't do," said one of the committee, Guillaume Sand, placing the file aside.
"Of course not," agreed another, Ibrahim Lakhdar. "Like we accept Jews anymore. They've served their purpose."
"To be fair, Goldstein claims not to be a practicing Jew," objected the third, Alan Menage.
"It's in the blood," Lakhdar sneered.
Menage shrugged. No sense it getting Ibrahim all worked up over it. Besides, it isn't like I really care about the Jews.
"Here's an interesting one," said Sand, opening a different application file and diverting the subject away from Lakhdar's distressingly open anti-Semitism. "Louis Arbeit. Harvard. Sorbonne. Early volunteer work with International Solidarity Movement. Parents are both Colleagues of Proven Worth. Mother: Christine Arbeit, D1 with the Human Rights Commission. An up and comer, I hear. Father: Bernard Chanet, Deputy Director for International Disarmament. His grandmother recently retired from the European Parliament."
Ibrahim took the file, impatiently, and began flipping pages. When he reached the background information page on the applicant's father, he signaled one of the water servants to bring a telephone. He spoke a number and, after a brief pause, a face appeared.
"Bernard? This is Ibrahim Lakhdar, with the hiring committee. Yes, yes . . . I am normally with Human Rights. I know your wife. I was looking over your son's application and I was wondering if you might not give a little boost to my nephew. He's a fine boy and he's interested in working disarmament . . . "
Chapter Eleven
(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)
—Kipling, The Islanders.
1/1/468 AC, Kibla Pass
Carrera stood in the fierce, bitterly cold winds of the Pashtian highlands. Despite the heavy wools, silks, polypropylene, and windproof outer shell, he shivered as the wind whistled through the pass and around the rocks. The wind seemed to be saying, "Avenge us."
"I'm trying; God knows I'm trying," he whispered back.
Down below, on the plains around Mazari Omar, his men were still busily rooting out the insurgency. It was probably a fruitless task. No matter what damage to the guerillas he did, the Taurans were taking back over even as he cleared areas out. They were good soldiers, many of them; he'd particularly been impressed with the Tuscan Ligurini under Generale Marciano. (Under cover of the Legion's combat operations, and in the absence of a treacherous press to report what he was doing, Marciano had pushed his own forces out to actively engage the guerillas. What would happen after the Legion del Cid left, Marciano didn't know.)
Ordinarily, using the kind of rules of engagement the Taurans had, it might take as much as fifteen years to destroy an insurgency, if, indeed, it could be destroyed at all. The Federated States' methods, having some of the stick to go along with the carrot, could do the job more quickly, if, again, it could be done at all. Carrera's methods used much less of the carrot, much more of the stick. It remained to be seen whether that would work any better. The Pashtian insurgency—ha! insurgency was practically a way of life for them!—had always been almost singularly tenacious.
It doesn't matter, he thought. I am not here, ultimately, to quell an insurgency, though I and my boys will give it our workmanlike best. Ultimately, I am here for the money that brings me closer to revenge and the revenge itself.
"It's a cold dish," whispered the wind.
That's all right. I've never minded cold food. But . . .
"But what?" asked the frozen breeze.
"But I miss Lourdes, and I miss the children. And I think maybe I need a break."
That was particularly telling. Only this morning he'd chewed out his chief logistician over something that, in retrospect, was just not that important. The week prior the goddamned nightmares had come back with a vengeance. His drinking was up again; it had to be or he'd never get any sleep. Yet alcohol induced sleep was not very restful. And then he'd seen off a couple of dozen of his killed and wounded at the airport at Mazari Omar and found himself starting to cry.
Bad sign, very bad sign. But what the hell can I do?
2/1/468 AC, The Base, Kashmir Tribal Trust Territory
If ever a man looked downcast, and in need of rest, it was Noorzad. Oh, he'd made it out, along with a critical dozen of his key followers. The rest? Bombed, burnt, butchered. Even after escaping from the mines dropped by air, he'd found a new group of fast horse cavalry on his tail, relentlessly tracking him over the mountains. He'd had to sacrifice the last of his newer people to those cavalry to buy time for the rest to escape.
His one weary eye, the white patches on his skin that told of frostbite, and the general air of sheer exhaustion he exuded; all said he needed a break.
There was one good thing, one tiny bright spot, amidst the disaster. Coordination between the lesser, mercenary infidels and the greater infidels in the north of Pashtia had been poor. Noorzad had half expected to be met by yet another ambush as he and the pitiful remnants of his band emerged from the snows of the central mountain range. Instead, there'd been nothing except some sympathetic tribesmen who'd provided camouflage for the guerillas on their way to the nearest city.
Once there, things had improved considerably. Noorzad had acquired a new satellite phone and reported in to Mustafa, seeking guidance and orders. Those had been simple, both to receive and to follow.
"Come home."
Now he was "home." However exhausted Noorzad might have been, he still could hardly wait to rebuild his force and return.
"That will be a while," Mustafa advised as he poured tea for the both of them with his own hand. "Our . . . infrastructure was not well rooted in the south of Pashtia. Our defenses were weak. And this enemy is not as weak as the Taurans. Worse, though he doesn't have the firepower of the greater enemy, he makes up for that with a ruthlessness to match our own."
"The men I left behind?" Noorzad queried.
"It was not your fault," Mustafa cut him off, insisting, "You had no other choice. To stand and fight would have meant being slaughtered. But . . . "
The lesser chief raised one eyebrow. "But?"
"As near as we can tell, they've cleaned out your band completely. And no, we cannot take hostages to trade because these infidels not only won't trade—that much we learned when they were in Sumer—they've already shot or hanged all their prisoners . . . unless they've spared a few for questioning."
A look of mental agony flashed briefly across Noorzad's face. If he had known, he would have stood and fought rather than run. Not that he'd cared about most of his men, especially the spoiled Yithrabis. But he'd left friends behind.
Mustafa read the look well. "No," he said. "That is, I think, part of their method. They shoot their prisoners precisely to make us want to stand and fight. They may someday sell our women and children as slaves to the same purpose."
"What now?" Noorzad asked, willing away his feelings of personal failure.
"Now the winter is upon us. The passes are mostly closed. South of the mountains the infidel is continuing to clear out our people and the filthy, decadent Taurans are setting up shop again. In the spring, the mercenaries will surge over the mountains to reinforce the Federated States and Anglia. We cannot stop them, though we can bleed them."
"Cut their supply?"
"No . . . I think not," Mustafa answered. The Federated States troops require more in supply per man, even for light infantry, than the Volgans did for their armored troops. They must have their comforts, at least when in base. The lesser infidels seem to require much less. They live . . . . rough." There was a tone almost of admiration in Mustafa's voice. "I don't think we can appreciably interdict their supply lines."
Noorzad sighed sadly. "Then . . . my men go unavenged?"
"No," Mustafa smiled. "No; we have a plan and a means to hurt these infidels in return."
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4/1/468 AC, Xamar Coast, Motor Yacht The Big ?
The Legion del Cid tended to take a somewhat legalistic approach to counterinsurgency and piracy suppression. They could have simply started at one end of the Xamar coast and worked their way to the other, killing everything that lived and making the entire coast uninhabitable. But, much as they never sent someone for serious torture until a duly constituted court had pronounced sentence of death, so they would not destroy a village unless it could be directly linked to the support of piracy.
They had such a village now. Early this morning The Big ? had passed close to some fishing boats to allow the crews to get a look at the awesome mammary display on the forward deck. Then the yacht had sailed directly southward, paralleling the coast and heading generally towards a village suspected of being a pirate haven. Overhead, silently, a small remotely piloted vehicle with a high resolution camera had caught good quality facial shots of the villagers as they'd cheered their own boat out to intercept the infidel yacht. Was this entrapment? Who cared? It wasn't as if the village wasn't predisposed to piracy. It wasn't as if they hadn't had a boat ready.
The Suzy Q had been little more than a field modification. The Big ? was almost purpose built from the keel up by a Sachsen shipbuilder with some long tradition of building clandestine surface raiders. She mounted hidden side-firing machine guns, as had her predecessor, three per side. However, the firing ports on The Big ? were centrally controlled, as were the guns themselves, from an armored fire control station just under the cockpit.
That fire control station also had command over the two main guns. Forward, there was, as with Suzy Q, a rising gun, hydraulically driven. There was also a stern gun mounted to fire through a port that opened under central control. Both were 40mm high velocity pieces, firing from fifty-five round magazines. All the positions, along with the hull itself, were now fairly heavily armored.
More thought had been given to tactics now, too, given the sad end of Suzy Q. The side guns and the forward gun were not to be the primary engagement stations any longer. Instead, when under threat the boat would turn away from any attacker, allowing its rear 40mm to begin the engagement. That station, the entire stern, in fact, was extremely well-armored. Indeed, under the smooth-appearing white hull was not only a three centimeter belt of steel, outside of that steel a complicated matrix of boron carbide resin, ceramic, polyurethane, and tungsten proofed the hull against the largest weapons the pirates had shown so far, the shoulder-fired rocket grenade launcher.
Because of the weight of the stern armor belt, the engines had had to be placed somewhat forward of center. This gave the boat some peculiar handling characteristics, notably a comparatively tight turn radius and a comparatively quick recovery from a tight turn. The engines themselves, twin diesels with an aggregate horsepower of over eight thousand, were capable of pushing the boat at almost the speed of the Santisima Trinidad.
Moreover, except for an excess of fold down bunks in the crew spaces, it looked like a yacht even to a suspicious boarding customs agent. Even the guns were not obvious from inside the yacht, being hidden behind what looked like storage spaces and under fixed bunks.
Though they were crew, as corporals Marta and Jaquelina had a stateroom of their own. Since Marta was a screamer this was less of an advantage than it might have been. In fact, the two slept together but approximately chaste. "Approximately" because while Marta was a screamer, Jaquie was not and Marta was a very giving girl.
* * *
"Kinda silly, isn't it?" Chu asked Rodriguez.
"Huh?"
"C'mon, Rod, you only have to look at them to see they're in love. Everybody knows it and looks the other way."
"Oh . . . " Centurion Rodriguez sighed. "I told them to cool it before they ever signed on as regulars. I'm a little surprised they took my advice, really."
"Yeah."
Chu's eyes scanned the instruments. "Classis was right. We've got company coming."
Rodriguez nodded. "I'll go have the girls put on their act and get my boys standing by."
As the Cazador left the cockpit, Chu picked up the microphone for the encrypted radio. "Dos Lindas, this is The Big? We have company coming and we are preparing to engage."
5/1/468 AC, Combat Information Center, Dos Lindas
Fosa saw that there was a new kill recorded for The Big ? on the operations board down in CIC. Below the Ops board, a chart showed the intercept course between the Dos Lindas and a helicopter chartered by Hartog Shipping, based in Haarlem.
Haarlem still did quite a bit of shipping around the globe. As such, her merchant fleet had suffered more than most from the pirates' depredations both along the Xamar Coast and through the Nicobar Straits. It wasn't really surprising then, that a mid-sized Haarlem company, Hartog, had contacted Nagy and asked about hiring protection from the Legion del Cid. Nagy had entered negotiations, in consultation with both Fosa and the Yamatan representative, Kurita, and hammered out a workable, and sufficiently profitable, deal.
As part of that deal, the Haarlemers had insisted on face-to-face contact with the commander of the flotilla. There had seemed no principled reason to refuse.
The Haarlem registry helicopter had come in with the morning sun. Undaunted by the machine guns ostentatiously trained on it, it had flown twice around the Dos Lindas before settling down to a marked spot on the rear deck. There it was met by a small party of escorts and brought down to CIC to meet the skipper.
* * *
Fosa shook hands; Kurita bowed slightly. The Haarlemers introduced themselves as Ms. Klasina Frank and her administrative assistant, Christian Verdonk. Frank seemed extremely pale and rather plump, quite in contrast to the very deeply tanned and athletic-looking Verdonk.
Both Haarlemers' faces were guardedly friendly as Fosa led them through a tour of the ship. He took them through the five decks of the ship's tower, then down to the deck encircling the hangar and finally down to the hangar deck itself where he'd assembled one company of Cazadors and a roughly equal number of ship and air crew. Frank and Verdonk walked the line, following Fosa. He didn't lead them down each rank.
Later, over a cordial but not overly friendly lunch in Fosa's quarters, which meal the visitors barely touched, the skipper explained, "We cannot guarantee you protection. You understand this? The most we can do is try, within reason, to conform our deployments to the passage of your company's ships, to come as quickly as possible, if we are in practical range, if one of your ships is attacked, and to station small parties of Cazadors on some of your ships as they make the passage. In theory, we are capable of conducting rescue operations, but as a practical matter, we've never really been able to rescue any crew once they were taken to shore. I doubt we ever shall be able to."
"Hartog Shipping understands this," Ms Frank said, looking up from her uneaten rehydrated pork chops. Shrugging, she added, "We are not paying so much that we could ask for more. As long as you will be willing to go to the aid of ships as you are able, or let one shelter under your wings at need, this is enough."
6/1/468 AC, Hajipur, Sind
Ownership of Hartog Shipping was an interesting subject. Indeed, it was so interesting that a not inconsiderable portion of the both Federated States intelligence and investigative assets, with a healthy assist from Yamatan Imperial Intelligence, had gone into trying to determine just who owned the company, and others like it. Between ships owned but leased elsewhere, and some of those passing through four or five or, in one case, even nine nominal leasers before being leased back, plus shadow corporations, secret stock ownership, and front organizations, it had never proven possible to determine ownership of the company to any degree of certainty. This was actually normal.
Mustafa didn't have that problem. He knew who owned Hartog. For all practical purposes, he did. At least he had a controlling interest.
For the most part, he exercised no control. Rather, he left it to the company management to keep the affair solvent. He had, however, inte
rvened to the extent of having two of the company's lesser assets filled with thoroughly reliable, even fanatical, Salafi skippers and crew. He had also intervened to obtain the company's sailing schedule, then passed that on to Abdulahi in Xamar so that the latter could attack a few Hartog vessels. This was a necessary cover for what was to follow.
The chosen ship, the Hendrik Hoogaboom, was an older, dry-bulk cargo carrier of roughly sixty-eight hundred tons capacity. Measuring one hundred and two meters in length at the waterline, and just under eighteen in beam, she was of a perfect size for her chosen task. Indeed, she was not really very well suited anymore for her designed task, being more or less uneconomical to run. Neither Mustafa nor Hartog Shipping would much miss the Hoogaboom once she'd completed her mission.