A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Noticing the body, Cruz had the somewhat inane thought, drummed into him in Basic, Concealment is not cover.

  The thought was interrupted by the entrance, firing, of the last two men in Cruz's fire team. A closet door swung slowly open to allow a Sumeri body to tumble to the floor.

  "Room's clear, Cruz," one of the men reported.

  "Rivera, with me. Escobedo, stay here. Guard."

  Leaving the light machine gun behind, Cruz and Rivera hastened back to where a prone Sanchez lay with his rifle still trained on the door opposite.

  Before the three men could storm the next room they heard firing coming from behind them. Escobedo screamed. When they turned around, they saw the Sumeri who had been under the broken-down door turning an assault rifle in their direction. Rivera was a trifle faster than the Sumeri, who went down bonelessly from several close range hits. Cruz rushed back to find Escobedo hit but breathing, shot through the back.

  "Motherfuckers," Cruz muttered. He went back to Sanchez and Rivera, stopping to call down the stairs, "Sergeant, I've got a wounded man up here; Escobedo. And the fuckers are not playing by the rules."

  "Keep up the assault, Cruz," the sergeant returned. "I'll send up a medic for your man."

  Instead of rushing to force down the next door, Cruz fired another long burst through it. Then he and Rivera advanced to take position on opposite sides. Sanchez got on his feet, advanced, and slammed his foot against the portal, which burst open. Cruz and Rivera then sprayed the room with fire.

  Entering, Cruz saw three Sumeris, all apparently hit, one with his back against the wall. Without a word Cruz turned his rifle on the first and fired a burst. This was known as "double tapping," or making sure. He shot the second and, as he was turning to the third saw the Sumeri's eyes open wide as he reached for a rifle. Cruz shot him, too, and whispered, "Got to learn to play by the rules. Fuckers."

  Looking at the bodies, Cruz felt his anger cool. Turning away from the carnage, he thought, Cara, queridisima, I wish I could come home to you now.

  Interlude

  17 Safar, 1502 AH, Medina, Saudi Arabia (22 December 2078)

  The sun was fading away to the west as the muezzin, his voice amplified by speakers mounted on the minaret walls, called the faithful to prayer. Some other place, perhaps, and the Royal Family might just have ignored the call if business pressed. Not here. Here the force of Allah and of the words conveyed by the Prophet were strong. Here, the king and his brother stopped their discussions, abased themselves, and prayed.

  "He wants a stone, just one stone," said Bandar to his brother, the king, once prayers were over. He continued, "One stone out of sixteen hundred and fourteen outside, and who knows how many inside, and it isn't even the Hajar ul Aswad, the Black Stone."

  "But the Kaaba is sacred, like the Word of Allah, never-changing and eternal."

  "Nonsense, Brother," Bandar insisted. "The Word is eternal but the Kaaba has been rebuilt anywhere from five to a dozen times; no one's really quite sure. The most recent rebuild was eighty-five years ago, in 1417. It has had major components replaced, has had its shape changed from a rectangle to a square to a rectangle to a square and back to a rectangle again. It has had new stones added and old ones thrown away. And all Abdul ibn Faisal wants is one lousy stone to take with him to al Donya al Jedidah."

  "We'd have to take down at least one wall to get at the stone he wants," the king objected.

  "And we've taken down walls before," Bandar countered, "that same five to one dozen times I mentioned. What's one more time? We can begin right after this Hajj and have the thing rebuilt before the next, possibly even before Ramadan."

  The king looked closely at his brother. "And what would be the point, after all? What good comes of it?"

  Bandar took a deep breath before continuing. When he did, he said, "Brother, we have problems. The oil is going fast. Europe is plunging into blackness and all our investments there are crumbling away. Our population is growing beyond our ability to care for and beyond the capability of the secret police to control."

  "We had hoped that by becoming a major food grower we could break our dependence on western imports. For a while, even, we were the fourth largest exporter of wheat in the world. We export none of that now, and again have to import wheat.

  "And the Salafi are growing out of hand. We had thought the Americans would have curtailed their influence once they defeated al Qaeda. It didn't last.

  "We have to advance – yes, like the West – and we cannot when every forward step we take is blocked by the Salafi."

  The king's hand reached up to stroke his beard. "So you think if we give up the stone, this one of sixteen hundred and fourteen, then some sizable number of the Salafi will simply pack up and leave? Remember the disaster on the first colonization ship."

  Bandar nodded. "They were mixed. We shall hire, perhaps even build or, more likely, have built, a ship or ships to take the Salafi away. Will they go? Yes, and quite possibly a large number of them. And if we can get rid of a sizable number initially, we can change this country enough to make it uncomfortable for the rest so that they leave too. Oh, Brother, I am telling you; this Donya al Jedidah is the answer to our prayers."

  The king chewed on his lower lip and then reached up one hand to stroke his beard, contemplatively. "You know, there's another potential advantage here, Brother. What if we used our influence to set aside an area for the Zionists on the New World. Surely some would go; they've got to be as tired of the constant fighting as the Palestinians are, if not more so. They've got to be tired of the taxes, the constant military duty. If we can entice away some numbers of Jews, the burdens on those who remain will grow greater still. That might well make even more leave. And each who leaves makes it more likely, just as with our own fanatics, that more will leave. Get enough to go and the Zionist entity falls."

  "You're dumping our problems here on the people we send out," Bandar objected.

  The king shrugged eloquently. "So?"

  Bandar considered. He rocked his head back and forth for a few moments. Finally, he shrugged to match his brother. "Indeed. 'So?'"

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war; it allows of the capturing of every armed enemy, and every enemy of importance to the hostile government, or of peculiar danger to the captor; it allows of all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy; of the appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the Army, and of such deception as does not involve the breaking of good faith either positively pledged, regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist. Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.

  —The Lieber Code, Section 15

  Ninewa, Sumer, 22/2/461 AC

  The sand tore at Amid Adnan Sada's face. He didn't mind, not in the slightest.

  Keeps their damned planes and attack helicopters away, at least, and so, Allah, for this I thank You.

  Sada, an Amid, or brigadier general, in the Army of the Republic of Sumer, wore desert battle dress with insignia of his unit, rank and branch sewn on. A khaki colored cloth was tied over his mouth and nostrils; breathing was nearly impossible otherwise.

  But, Allah, Sada amended, I would really have appreciated it if you had brought the wind and the dust earlier so I could have brought in enough to feed my men.

  "And that's the problem, Amid," Sada's supply officer had said. "I have the ammunition, building materials, fuel and all that. But food? I have ten days' supply, or maybe fifteen on short rations. No more."

  The supply officer, Major – or Raiid – Faush, was one of th
e good ones, Sada thought. Another man might have sold the lot, or stored it to sell to the FSC when their forces arrived. Faush I can trust. Faush I can count on. And he isn't even a clan member. How often does that happen?

  In fact, in Sada's brigade it happened more often than not. He had his ways.

  Sada's cell phone rang, sounding loudly even over the roar of the howling wind. He answered it, saw that it was a text message, and began to laugh.

  "General?" questioned Faush.

  Instead of answering, Sada just passed the phone over. Faush read.

  "How did they get our personal cell phone numbers?" he asked, after reading. "I mean, there ought to be something private in life; something sacred."

  The text message on the phone was an invitation to surrender from the FSC's Office of Strategic Intelligence.

  "I don't know, Faush," Sada answered, still laughing. "Hell, it will probably work for nine out of ten of our top commanders."

  "No matter, Amid; it won't work here." Faush sounded more confident than perhaps he felt. Not that Sada would surrender easily. That was never going to happen, Faush was certain. Why, in the Sumer-Farsia war of sixteen years before Sada, then a captain commanding the rump of a cut-off and undersupplied infantry battalion against uncountable and fanatical Farsian human wave assaults, had refused to surrender for weeks. He'd held the Farsians off, too, until relief got to him. There was not a man who survived that ordeal but didn't worship the ground the Amid walked on, at least when they thought Allah might not be looking. Faush was one of those survivors, as were most of the key leaders of Sada's current command.

  Achmed Qabaash, Sada's operations officer, observed, enthusiastically, "We'd better fight like hell. Everyone says the enemy coming from the south doesn't take prisoners." Qabaash liked a good fight. He was odd that way.

  "I wonder if that's true," Sada said. "I know they've make no secret of not taking prisoners if the men concerned are with a unit that violated the western laws of war. But there was a division's worth of men in towns to the south of us. I doubt they killed them all."

  Highway One, eighty-seven miles south of Ninewa

  Dusty, tired, hungry and miserable Sumeri POWs trekked under armed guard southward, directly into the wind.

  Soult, his face like his chief's handkerchiefed against the biting wind and sand, looked at the prisoners with a degree of contempt. He couldn't really understand surrendering, even on the promise of good treatment. Better to die like a soldier.

  "Are they all cowards, boss?" he asked Carrera. "We offer to take prisoners and they surrender. We kill everything moving and they still try to surrender. I just don't understand it. Seems chicken to me."

  Carrera, sitting on the canvas seat next to Soult took a moment before answering, simply, "They're no more cowardly as a people than anyone else. Cowards don't fly airships into buildings. Cowards don't load themselves with explosives and try to get close enough to do us some harm before detonating themselves. No, Jamey, they're not cowards. But they have some problems. It's the problems that account for most of the violations of the laws of war they engage in."

  Seeing from his eyes, the only uncovered part of his face, that Soult didn't really understand, Carrera continued. "The sociologists call them "amoral familists." What that means is that they are raised in such a way that they cannot really conceive of legitimate loyalty to someone who isn't a blood relation. For that matter, when it is a question of loyalty to two blood relations the one with the closer relationship is the one who gets the loyalty. Religion counts to them, too, and a lot, but that makes very different demands on them. Nation? Means nothing to most . . . or less than nothing, often enough. The family is where their important loyalties lie, the family is what will protect them from a hostile world, the family is their law and their guide."

  "Yeah . . . but so?" Soult plainly didn't understand.

  "It means they're completely alone, Jamey, completely alone in the most terrifying place man can exist, the modern battlefield. They can't trust their squad mates, they can't trust their officers, unless those are also blood relations. For any given soldier in a Sumeri – or Yithrabi, Jahari or Misrani – unit under serious duress the only questions are, "Can I run or surrender before the rest do? Am I going to be stuck here, alone, to face the enemy while the rest run?" It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, true. But the way a prophecy becomes self-fulfilling is by being destined to be fulfilled." Carrera sounded sad.

  "You actually like them, don't you, Boss?"

  "Jamey . . . " Carrera hesitated, "I used to like them a lot. It's . . . harder now.

  "Sometimes they can break out of that self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way," Carrera added, perhaps only to change the direction in which the conversation had turned. "Some of their tribally based units aren't bad, though they've got problems when the tribal chain of command and the military one don't mesh. They've also got problems in that the tribe, while it might fight well, has a very finite tolerance for casualties.

  "The other way, and it has happened occasionally, is when some outsider is in command who refuses to have any truck with tribes. If he can assemble a group that has no tribal majority, preferably if he can assemble one where each member has no tribal link with any other, sometimes he can make a good unit. Sometimes. It's harder than hell to do."

  Ninewa, Sumer, 22/2/461 AC

  Sada walked from building to building, inspecting the positions his men were preparing as they made ready to defend the town. It was a relief to go inside, if only to escape from the dust. Some of his boys were digging up the streets to excavate trenches to connect the buildings. That would, Sada was sure, come in handy.

  The lieutenant in charge of the platoon was new. Sada searched his memory. Lieutenant Rashad is from the Bani Malik tribe. His platoon sergeant is one of my old boys, from the Farsian War, an Al-Hameed. Squad leaders are . . .

  "Sergeant Major?" Sada questioned.

  "Sir," began the sergeant major, "no two members of the same tribe in this platoon." Sada's brigade sergeant major, and McNamara would have approved, had grown very good at reading his boss' mind over the preceding decades.

  The units of Sada's brigade were organized in one of two ways. About a third of them were strictly set up along tribal lines, the only caveat to that structure being that the leadership of the unit and the leadership of the tribe within the unit had to match. The Amid had run off more than one sergeant, senior in the tribe's hierarchy, who had thought to ignore his captain, who was junior.

  The other two thirds, roughly, Sada and his right hand man, the sergeant major, went out of their way to ensure had no tribal identity. It seemed to Sada that one of the problems – and he understood them even better than Carrera did – was that extra-tribal loyalty couldn't grow wherever there was a focus for tribal loyalty, but could, potentially, where there was none. The toughest part had been the officers, whom one could ordinarily have expected to loot their units if the men in those units had no blood ties.

  Give the dictator this much, thought Sada. He kept his own tribe out of my brigade, excepting only a couple of spies, and didn't mind how many men from other tribes I had shot for corruption.

  Sada had shot a few of them personally. He still smiled sometimes at the memory of Faush's predecessor, caught with his hand in the till. Sada had simply drawn his pistol and shot the man at point blank range. That was how Faush had inherited the job.

  Pity what the blood did to the books though, Sada thought regretfully.

  The lieutenant of the platoon misinterpreted the look on his amid's face. "Sir, the men are working as hard as they can . . . "

  "Show me your hands," Sada ordered.

  Still uncomprehending, the lieutenant held up clean hands with unbroken nails.

  Sada smiled indulgently. He leaned over to whisper in the young officer's ear. "You're new, my son. So I'll forgive you . . . this once. But officers in my brigade work. Officer in my brigade lead. You will work if you want to continue to lea
d. Or would you prefer to go to the penal platoon, minus your rank, now?"

  Eighty miles south of Ninewa

  The sun was setting on a desolate scene, made all the more so by the dust which covered everything in swirling, choking eddies. Red leaflets, prepared by the Psychological Operations Century and dropped by Cricket recon plane ahead of the legion as it advanced, also blew in the breeze. The leaflets proclaimed the list of Sumeri violations of the laws of war, to date, and the legion's bloody-handed response to them.