A Desert Called Peace-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Once inside, she saw four men, their arms bound behind them, hanging by those arms from meat hooks attached to the wooden beams of the ceiling. The men's heads hung low, the very picture of abject misery, while their toes barely touched the floor.

  "Would you like to record their faces?" Carrera asked genially. When she didn't answer immediately he walked up to the nearest of the hanging men and, grabbing him by the hair, lifted his face for the camera.

  Temujin was so shocked she didn't even wonder at Carrera's arrogance in showing her all this horror. Doesn't realize I'm from Amnesty? Or that I have pull around the globe?

  "Be sure to get this, gentlemen," he told the camera team. "Ms. Temujin will want it all recorded." He did the same with each of the others.

  "Irene, would you like to see the rest?"

  Normally tawny face gone white with horror, the woman gulped and answered, "Yes."

  In the next cell, a small room showed a half naked man bound to a metal chair. Wires led from a field telephone to the floor where they were lost in a mass of wires. Wires also were attached directly to the prisoner's genitals. A Sumeri, in the uniform of Sada's brigade, asked questions of the bound prisoner. When answers were not forthcoming, another Sumeri sitting at the table began to turn the crank on the field phone. The bound prisoner screamed and writhed piteously. There was a puddle of urine on the floor. A smell of overripe shit escaped the cell's small window.

  The next cell showed a man on a wooden table. Another interrogator asked questions while an assistant played a blowtorch over the far side of the prisoner's leg, furthest away from the door. The screaming was absolutely hideous and nauseating. There was an overwhelming smell of burnt pork.

  Temujin turned and began to storm out. Before she made it she bent over suddenly, adding the smell of her own vomit to the sickening stench that pervaded the facility.

  Babel, Hotel Ishtar, 21/7/461 AC

  Carrera had provided an escort for Irene all the way to Babel. "It would never do," he explained, "for you to be killed in my ZOR." At least once we've accepted you in and assumed a sort of tacit responsibility. The escort had consisted of two light wheel vehicles and a heavier truck with a tarp pulled over it. Fernandez had volunteered to serve as escort officer.

  Once back at her hotel, Temujin had wasted no time in calling for a press conference. At that, she had made her statement and shown her video of the horrors being perpetrated near Ninewa. She called, forcefully and sincerely, for, "This illegal occupation to end."

  At about that time, Fernandez walked into the back of the large press room containing hundreds of reporters. He had a fairly large armed escort with him. Temujin, closing her prepared statement, wondered for a moment if they were here to arrest her. She pointed and started to say, "There's one of the torturers—" when she recognized the face of one of the armed men standing by Fernandez's side.

  Oh, shit, she thought. The bastards.

  She didn't need to say it. As one the assembled media types turned around and saw for themselves.

  The man to whom Irene had pointed had appeared on the film she had just shown. He appeared on the film not as one of the guards or interrogators, but as one of the "victims," the very first one hanging with his arms behind him, as a matter of fact. (For, unnoticed by Irene, another rope had run from the bound hands to encircle his waist under his clothing.) Despite the current highly amused smile, the face was completely recognizable. So were the faces of every other man in Fernandez's escort, every man who had ridden to Babel in the back of a tarp-covered truck, every man who had been seen under "torture."

  Yet here he was, here they were, free and armed. That meant . . .

  The reporters turned their questioning faces back toward Temujin who sat there, dumbly.

  "If she'd seen nothing," Fernandez shouted over the hubbub, "she'd still have reported the same thing. It's her business to find torture in the world. It's so much her business that she didn't even think to question the show we put on for her. I've got to ask you people, how stupid are you that you would assume accurate reporting from a woman as gullible as that?

  "Now, if any of you would like to talk to the "victims," they're at your disposal."

  Camp Balboa, Ninewa, 22/7/461 AC

  "Patricio, that was just mean!" Lourdes chided as they watched the television in the three bedroom adobe bungalow the troops had put up for them. The party, Carrera and Lourdes plus Sada and his wife, sat on the floor on cushions. Ruqaya, Sada's wife, had shown Lourdes how to make a first class kibsa, which sat mostly eaten (with fingers) on a tray in the middle.

  Carrera couldn't answer at first; he was laughing too hard.

  "He was perfectly correct to do this, Miss Lourdes," Sada insisted. "Prestige drives these people, that and their perks. Humiliation is what they fear the most. That woman is personally crushed, probably forever. Her entire organization is humiliated. Patricio has pulled the incisors of a major enemy."

  "It was really Fernandez's idea," Carrera submitted, humbly, though it was a hard statement to get out through his laughter. "Frankly, I couldn't believe that she'd be stupid enough to fall for it, that anyone would be stupid enough to fall for it. The tricky part was collecting the special effects, the blood and shit and such, to make it seem real. Fortunately, one of the mess halls had some pork we could burn up with a blowtorch. And the "victims" and "interrogators" had already been rehearsed."

  "Those were important, Legate Patricio, but she saw what she expected to see," Sada explained. "She made herself fall for it."

  "It was still mean," Lourdes insisted.

  "But it was clever," Sada's wife, Ruqaya, answered, sipping at her tea.

  Hospital Cerro Ancon, 23/7/461 AC

  If I were truly clever, thought the doctor, I'd have thought of this myself. It's just amazing what a young girl looking on or helping can do to move progress along. The doctor smiled indulgently as young Private Mendoza walked – with difficulty, true, but he walked – with one arm over the shoulder of the lovely young girl who came to see him every day. Her arm was about his waist.

  "This is so hard, Quelli," the boy said, "and I'm too heavy for you."

  "Nonsense, Jorge. Did you forget I'm a farm girl, not some soft, city-bred wilting flower?"

  Mendoza had wondered what she looked like. At some level he knew it could not matter to him so long as he couldn't see. On the other hand, looks or not she was shaped right. That, he could tell from the press of her tiny body against him and the times they walked with only his arm around her waist for support. God, is she shaped right!

  The pair reached as far as they could in the physical therapy and prosthetics area. Marqueli guided Jorge in a half-stumbling turn and they began the return promenade.

  "I heard Legate Carrera and Duce Parilla have decreed a beca" – an educational scholarship – "for all seriously wounded or decorated veterans," Marqueli said.

  "Something to think on," Mendoza agreed. "But I've only got a high school education. And then there's the farm to think about."

  "Well, as to the farm," the girl answered, "you really don't need to worry about it. Your mother told me over the phone that she's found someone to work it for her."

  "I know . . . but that land's been in our family for over four hundred years. It doesn't feel right having someone else work it."

  Marqueli understood that call of the land. Her family, too, had been ranching the same patch for as long as Mendoza's. Indeed, she'd checked the local histories and birth records and discovered that they'd both had ancestors who'd ridden with the semi-legendary Belisario Carrera in his war against Earth. The reason she'd checked, though, had been to find out degree of consanguinity. They were, it seemed, roughly seventh cousins . . . though it was more complicated than that as there was more than one link. The reason she'd checked that . . . well . . . that was for later.

  In the interim, there was the torture of Jorge learning to walk to see to.

  SS Hildegard Mises, Yithrabi Coast,
23/7/461 AC

  Relatively few people were actually tortured on the ship. For most, a tour of what was available was generally sufficient. While Jorge and Marqueli worked out his new legs, and Irene Temujin wallowed alone in the abject misery of worldwide embarrassment, other people arrived at a ship registered to Balboa and currently coasting off of Yithrab. The ship was unremarkable, a freighter with nothing much to distinguish it on the outside except for what appeared to be a helicopter platform. An IM-71 helicopter sat on the pad, but only for so long as it took to disgorge five tightly bound men and a woman.

  They were prisoners. They'd had all the due process anyone might expect, however, and been found guilty of numerous war crimes to include failure to meet the requirements for legal combatancy. They were illegal combatants, in other words.

  Identified as outsiders by the men of his brigade that Sada had spread out as "watchers," four of the men had been grabbed from a safe house set up by Sumer's dictator in the days before the invasion for just such a purpose. The other two were the homeowner and his wife. All six had been captured in a raid by the Cazador Cohort, aided by some Sumeri guides from Sada's brigade.

  The prisoners had been taken, in secret, to another safe house, this one controlled by Sada's men. There all six had been court-martialed, separately, in camera and sentenced to hang. A mullah – Carrera had asked Sada for, "An honest mullah, one who will stay bought." – and two of his associates had approved the penalty as fitting under Islamic law. Fernandez had given the mullah six gold drachmae as a reward, to be divided as the mullah, Hassim, thought fit.

  The executions had been duly announced, along with the notice that the bodies had been cremated and the ashes scattered against the Day of Judgment when Allah could rejoin their atoms or not, as he saw fit. Instead of having been executed, however, the six were taken at night in a sealed vehicle to the airfield inside the camp and loaded aboard the helicopter. This had then flown them, also in secret, to the ship, the helicopter skimming the waves and even venturing into Farsian airspace to confuse radar.

  Gagged with duct tape, none had been given a chance to talk with each other since their capture.

  On the ship they were separated and carried individually to separate containers which had been soundproofed. There they were chained to the walls while the program for each was worked out by the Sumeri interrogators on Fernandez's Black Budget.

  Looking over the files on each, the chief interrogator, Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda, tapped his fingers on first one picture, then another. These are either brothers or close cousins, Mahamda thought. What one knows the other will know as well. He placed the files together on his desk and wrote on a slip of paper, "Interrogation Course M."

  This meant that the cousins, or brothers, would be used as a check on each other. If their stories failed to match in any particular, pain would be first threatened and, if that failed, applied until they did match.

  It's funny; thought Mahamda, well, funny for certain values of funny, that for all that relatives and comrades try to concoct a story beforehand, they can never get all the details right. They might agree on, "We were just minding our own business going to the goat auction," but they never think of "What's Khalid's mother's maiden name?" They never remember to work out and commit to memory a purely spurious route or set of connections and events. Even if they did, they wouldn't remember to update it daily and couldn't commit it to memory even if they tried. And once we get them screaming and talking, once they lose confidence in each other and the story, there's no stopping point and they'll spill everything.

  The others were more problematic. At this stage, the insurgency wasn't really well developed enough – even the bi-weekly mortaring of Camp Balboa had grown somewhat listless – for there to have been much intelligence to gather. Sada's watchers watched, of course, even so.

  The first course of the treatment, for each of the prisoners, was to give them a guided tour of the ship. This was usually enough to loosen even very fixed tongues.

  Muhammad al Kahlayleh was the first of the newcomers to be given the tour. His interrogator introduced himself genially. "I'm Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda, and you are going to tell me everything I want to know."

  Al Kahlayleh told Mahamda, a very genial seeming and somewhat overweight former member of the dictator's Mukhabarat, or secret police, "I'll tell you nothing."

  Al Mahamda just kept the genial smile and answered, very confidently, "Yes, you will. Trust me on this. I've been at this business a long time. It's just a job to me but it's a job I do very well."

  With al Kahlayleh's hands cuffed to a chain about his waist, and accompanied by two stout escorts, al Mahamda led the prisoner to the first chamber. This contained a dental chair, with all the usual appurtenances and some extra features for holding the "patient" firmly in place.

  "We usually begin here, my friend," al Mahamda began. "The teeth are not strictly necessary for life, can be repaired almost indefinitely, and are extremely painful to have drilled without anesthesia."

  A smiling Sumeri in a white coat bobbed his head, also genially, agreeing, "Oh, yes, it is truly awful what we can do here, more or less indefinitely." Al Kahlayleh's tawny face blanched, as much at the present geniality as at the future prospect.

  "Of course, there are other methods," Al Mahamda continued, still smiling. "This way, please."

  The next chamber held another chair, not unlike the dental chair in the first, but without any of the instruments.

  "This is worse," the warrant officer said. "Here, we do more or less permanent damage. The chair is to hold you still for it."

  "Permanent damage?" the prisoner asked.

  "Oh, yes. Here fingernails are removed. Gonads are crushed. Also we can attach an electrode to your penis and stick one up your ass." Al Mahamda shook his head. "If you think a dental drill is painful, well . . . " Mahamda shuddered delicately.

  "Come on, only fair to show you the rest."

  The next chamber held a similar chair. Along one wall was a bench on which were neatly laid out a series of obscure instruments.

  "This one is particularly fascinating," Al Mahamda said, picking up a complex metal assembly with places for neck, knees and wrists, plus a rack and pinion method for closing the entire apparatus. "It's called the "Scavenger" – I haven't a clue why – and it does everything the old rack used to do, but in a fraction of the space. It will break your bones, deform your spine, dislocate your joints. It's pretty awful, but very little effort for us which, as you may imagine, we appreciate."

  The prisoner gulped.

  "And then there's this," the warrant continued, holding up what looked like an outsized wooden shoe with handles and screws. "We put this on one of your feet and simply crush that foot a millimeter at a time. You know," he said, with a trace of wonder in his voice, "as I said, I've been at this business a long time and I've never seen anyone resist this for long. I think it must be the idea that they'll be crippled for life that gets to them. What do you think?"

  "I think I'll tell you whatever you want to know," answered al Kahlayleh, shivering. "Just keep that shit away from me."

  So much for "I'll tell you nothing," thought al Mahamda.

  "You sure you wouldn't like just one little demonstration?" al Mahamda asked. "Just so you know we're sincere."

  "No, no," the would-be insurgent answered. "That won't be necessary. No, not at all necessary. I'll cooperate."

  "You're sure you wouldn't like a demonstration," al Mahamda asked again, pleasantly. "Just as a show of our good faith."

  "Please, no," the prisoner whimpered.

  "Very well, then." al Mahamda put the boot down, as if reluctantly. "You do realize, don't you, that if we catch you in a lie, now or later, you will get the treatment before I deign to talk to you again."

  "I said I'll talk," al Kahlayleh shouted. "Just get me out of here."

  "Very well. In light of your cooperative attitude, I think we can dispense with the rest of the
tour. Come with me."

  The four men began walking toward the bow of the ship when they passed an area marked, in Arabic, "Surgical Ward."

  "Is that for if someone has a heart attack while being questioned?" the prisoner asked.

  "Oh, no," the interrogator answered. "Well, that, too. But mostly this is for the really hard cases. See, we give them sex change operations before we strangle them so that they go to Allah as women."

  Kahlayleh's eyes rolled up in his head as he moaned and crumpled to the deck.

  Mahamda couldn't help but laugh. "You know, boys, it's amazing how often we get that reaction. That infidel, Fernandez, was a pure genius for thinking of this trick."

  Not that it was actually a trick, of course.