The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  “We cannot hope to stop these foul killers without changes — drastic changes — to the laws governing pursuit, detention, and prosecution of criminals. The time for playing by civilized rules is past. Long past. I am therefore invoking a planet-wide state of emergency to deal with this crisis. The POPPA Squadrons must be able to function swiftly and decisively, without being hamstrung by legal mandates requiring prisoners to be either formally charged based on hard and fast evidence or released no later than fifty hours after arrest. We cannot — dare not — run the risk of freeing the terrorists we manage to take into custody, since they will only contact their command structure, re-arm themselves, and strike again.

  “To that end, I am formally outlawing all forms of public assembly in groups of five or more individuals, for anyone except governmental officials carrying out the duties of their employment. If groups of private citizens are caught meeting on public streets, they will be detained as subversives and treated accordingly. All civic organizations — including worship services held by organized churches or temples — are likewise forbidden to assemble, whether publicly or in a private building or home. Any persons violating this stricture will be arrested, charged with threatening public welfare, and prosecuted to the greatest possible extent of the law.

  “I hereby order all peacekeeping forces, to include federal P-Squad officers, local police units, and military troops on active or reserve standby, to arrest anyone with known or suspected ties to dissident organizations. Arrest any individual known to hold antigovernment opinions. And I demand the immediate reimprisonment of every single individual who has been arrested or questioned on suspicion of terrorist ties within the past calendar year.

  “This is a beginning, my friends, but even this is not enough. We must halt the flow of illegal weaponry and supplies entering Jefferson from off-world. We know that thousands of criminals have been smuggled off-world, in illegal defiance of our best efforts to protect the innocent people of this world. These criminals have not only escaped justice, they are actively aiding the Granger terrorist network, serving as gunrunners and procurers of off-world mercenaries. I demand the immediate arrest of any individual who is known — or even suspected — to have family members illegally smuggled off-world. Find those individuals and extract names, munitions shipment dates, the names of ships and freighter captains helping them wage war against us. Find out who they are — and destroy them!”

  He brings down both fists against the podium, slamming the wood so hard, the nearest reporters jump with shock. “I have already sent a message to our embassy on Vishnu. I’ve ordered embassy officials and students loyal to the POPPA party to identify Granger agents working on Vishnu and Mali. Once we have rooted out the identity of these off-world murderers, we will crack open the network they have created in our midst and destroy it without hesitation, pity, or remorse. They have shown none to us. We will burn their bodies to ashes and sow their land with salt. And I swear to God and all the devils of hell, I will no longer feed enemy soldiers and dissidents whose sole aim is the destruction of this government.

  “Under my authority as president and commander in chief of Jefferson’s armed forces, I hereby order P-Squadron commanders to eliminate all enemies of the state currently held in custody. We will not waste our precious food resources on hardened butchers who want the rest of us dead. By God, we will not even waste ammunition on them. The people’s hard-earned taxes must pay for ammunition to launch an aggressive assault into rebel territory. I therefore direct commandants of prisons and work camps to find alternative means of dispatching the enemy soldiers and traitors already in custody. Use whatever means necessary to comply with this directive. Food resources currently earmarked for feeding traitors must be reallocated to support a new division of federal troops, which is being assembled as we speak, under the command of General Milo Akbarr, Commandant of Internal Security Forces.”

  I surmise from this statement that General Akbarr is preparing an assault on suspected Granger strongholds in the Damisi Mountain range. I believe this assault to be misguided, since I do not believe that blame for today’s blast can be laid on the Granger rebellion. There are several good reasons for this conclusion.

  It does not fit with Commodore Oroton’s modus operandi, which has demonstrated again and again his dedication to taking out only those individuals proven by their own actions to be corrupt and dangerous to Granger survival. Oroton has taken great care, in fact, to spare the lives of innocents in close proximity. I cannot believe that a commander as shrewd as Commodore Oroton would have authorized an attack of this magnitude, understanding as he does that any such attack would bring down the wrath of the entire POPPA party machine. He is no fool. I refuse to believe that such a commander would deliberately provoke the retribution that is, at this moment, falling on the heads of disarmed and vulnerable Grangers.

  No. Commodore Oroton did not engineer, orchestrate, or approve today’s bombing. There are too many people already in custody — and far too many more who shortly will be in custody — to risk those prisoners’ lives in a guaranteed bloodbath. By my calculation, which is doubtless lower than the actual number, there are three quarters of a million people in custody at work camps, holding facilities, and local jails. These people have no defense. Commodore Oroton knows this.

  Therefore, the wildcat broadcast taking credit for the attack can, I believe, be taken at face value. There is a separate, urban-based movement, with a far more ruthless approach than Oroton’s. I do not believe that Grangers can be implicated, let alone blamed, for today’s bombing. That does not appear to matter to Vittori Santorini, who apparently has no intention of discovering who was ultimately responsible for today’s blast. The legacy of Vice President Nassiona’s death will make a search unnecessary, since he has vowed to arrest anyone disagreeing with him, whether a person is a Granger or an urban dissident.

  I predict overtures from the Rat Guard Militia to Oroton’s Granger guerillas, to create an alliance that will, if allowed to blossom, prove fatal to POPPA and its leaders. Unless, of course, I am restored to some semblance of battlefield readiness in time to stop the inevitable slaughter.

  While I wait, that slaughter begins.

  II

  “Absolutely not!”

  Kafari glared up at Dinny Ghamal, whose violent objection to her plan burned like hellfire in his eyes. She measured him with one long, ice-cold stare. “Mister, I don’t recall anyone electing you commander of this rebellion.”

  Dinny’s skin was dark enough, anger didn’t show up as the bright flush that stained lighter complexions crimson, but there was no mistaking the anger that turned jaw muscles to iron and flared his nostrils. He bit down on the worst of the retort she could see balanced on the tip of his tongue, bit down and held it. When he could control the words trying to explode into the hot sunlight, he spoke with rigid formality. “Sir, we can’t afford the risk. If we mount a rescue operation — any rescue — it’ll have to be in the next few minutes or there won’t be anything to rescue but corpses—”

  “Which is exactly why we’re going in!” Kafari snarled.

  “Hear me out!”

  Kafari was on the ragged edge of shouting at him for insubordination when she saw the anger in his eyes shift, almost imperceptibly, into something else. Something dreadful. Stark fear. For her. She clacked her teeth together and breathed hard for several seconds. “All right, soldier,” she finally growled, “make it fast. People are already dying out there.”

  “I know,” he groaned. The memory of his mother’s death drew a veil of shadows across his eyes. “Believe me, I know. But if we hit those camps now, in the middle of the afternoon, we’ll have to move openly, in daylight. If the satellites don’t pick us up, you can bet your next paycheck some P-Squadder manning a radar array will. Even if we do nothing but fire high-angle mortars or launch ballistic missiles from hiding, they’ll track the flight path back to the point of launch. If we run for it — which we’ll have to
do, once the shooting starts — they’ll pinpoint these camps within minutes. And I wouldn’t give a snowball’s chance for the lives of any Granger caught within a hundred kilometer radius of our base camps. If we try to stop the massacres, we’ll risk losing the entire rebellion.”

  It was soundly reasoned. Kafari couldn’t fault him on that. She’d already considered every single argument he’d made. If this had been any other soldier — even Anish Balin — she would’ve simply overruled his objections and ordered him to comply or else. But this wasn’t any other soldier. It was Dinny Ghamal. She tried to find the right words to explain, because she needed Dinny’s support, not just grudging obedience to orders.

  “Simon once told me there comes a point in every battlefield commander’s career,” she said softly, “where the price for choosing safety — personal safety or the safety of one’s command, one’s troops — comes with too high a price tag. I started this war because I watched the brutal massacre of helpless people. Now there’s another massacre underway, only it’s far worse, this time. They’re not running over a few hundred protestors, they’re systematically executing seven-hundred fifty thousand helpless civilians. This is what we’re fighting the rebellion for, the whole reason we’re out here. If we fail these people, if we don’t even lift a finger to help them, we might as well just shoot ourselves and spare POPPA the trouble of doing it for us.”

  Dinny winced.

  Kafari said, as gently as possible, “It isn’t as suicidal as it looks, at first glance. Sonny’s out of commission—”

  “He’s still got functional guns.”

  “Yes, he does. But he’s got to know where to shoot and that gives us an edge. A pretty good one, actually. Simon’s got a full list of everything that’s malfunctioned, courtesy of Vittori, himself. He had to send a parts list to the Shiva Weapons Labs and Simon got hold of it. Sonny’s sensors are out. Everything but thermal imaging. As long as we keep our distance, he can’t do much more than take pot-shots in the dark. Trust me, I have no intention of sending any of our people close enough to that Bolo to register as a heat signature he can shoot at. I didn’t pick the timing and I’d like to strangle the commander of that damn-fool pack of idiots calling themselves the Rat Guard Militia, but whatever else is true, the odds will never be better. If Simon were here, he’d say we’ve just reached our Rubicon. All that remains is to decide whether or not we cross it.”

  “Rubicon?” he asked, frowning. “What the devil’s a Rubicon?”

  “A boundary. A line in the sand. A river crossing that divides a person’s life. On one shore, there’s only blind, unquestioning obedience to authority and on the other shore is the courage of your convictions. Once you’ve crossed that river, for good or ill, there’s no going back. Vittori’s crossed his Rubicon for all the wrong reasons, issuing the order to execute helpless people. You and I must decide whether or not to cross our Rubicon for all the right reasons, trying to rescue helpless people. If we don’t cross this river, Dinny, if we stay hidden in our safe little bolt-holes in these cliffs, we’ll never be fully human, again. Will you and I be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without flinching, if we hide in safety while three quarters of a million people are slaughtered? We must act, Dinny. If we don’t, we will never free this world—”

  “How can you say that?” Anguish and anger fought for control of his voice. “If we go out there now, if we just give away the location of our ammunition depots, our field rations, our equipment caches, they’ll throw everything they’ve got into scouring us off the face of this planet! They’ve got twenty-five thousand troops, fully trained, and every damned one of ’em lives and breathes for the chance to destroy us. It would be bad enough to lose the people we’d have to send out against those trigger-happy bastards. But if we lose you—”

  “If I’m that indispensable, Dinny Ghamal, then try putting a little faith into what I have to say.”

  He stood glaring at her for long, dangerous minutes, breathing like a foundered stallion with a jaglitch closing in for the kill.

  “At least,” Kafari added, gentling her voice, “do me the courtesy of listening.”

  A low, frustrated groan tore loose, a sound like a tree splitting down the center on a bitter winter’s night, torn apart by the stress of ice expanding through the heartwood. “I’m listening,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “We have one chance, Dinny. One breathless, fleeting chance, to turn the tide of this war to our advantage. We have to hit them hard and fast and we must do it right now. The Bolo is out of commission and the bulk of their own troops have scattered to round up more people to slaughter. Have you stopped to think — really think — about what will happen if we liberate six or seven hundred thousand people in one fell swoop?”

  He frowned, trying to suss out where she was headed and not able to see it. “We’ll have a hell of a provisioning problem,” he muttered. “But something tells me that’s not what you’re getting at.”

  “No. It isn’t. We’ve been thinking about the P-Squads and their twenty-five thousand officers from the viewpoint of guerilla soldiers. We are vastly outnumbered by a well-armed enemy. That’s about to change, my friend. Even if we manage to walk out of this with only a quarter of those prisoners still alive, we’re talking a hundred eighty thousand new soldiers fighting on our side.”

  His eyes widened. “Holy—”

  “Yes,” she said, voice droll with understated humor. “Our guns can turn the tide, Dinny, but we have to act right now, before the hour is out. Our guns and crews can get those people out. We can kill those trigger-happy guards and blow those electrified fences apart. And once we’ve got the prisoners out, we take this stinking game they’re playing and turn it on them. Is it worth the risk? You’re damned straight, it is.”

  She didn’t say the rest of it. She didn’t have to, because he said it, for her.

  “You came for us, that night,” he whispered. “That ghastly, horrible night on Nineveh Base…” He lifted his gaze, met hers, held it for long moments. “All right,” he muttered, “let’s go cross this Rubicon of yours and get it over with, ’cause somebody’s got to watch your damn-fool backside while we’re doing it.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were airborne, flying nap-of-the-earth in a tight formation of seven aircars. They’d made modifications to a whole fleet of aircars, months previously, knowing that eventually, a day like this — a moment like this — would come. For good or ill, they were at least ready. Kafari flew rear guard, letting Red Wolf do the actual piloting so she could concentrate on coordinating the multipronged attack. They couldn’t reach all the camps, not directly. She would do the best she could, by targeting the farthest ones with ballistic missiles capable of traveling halfway across the continent to strike the most remote camps.

  Her years of work as a spaceport psychotronic engineer were about to pay off. She waited until flashes of code reached her, signaling readiness from the entire strike force. Kafari touched controls on the console built into her command aircar. A signal raced out, providing the codes necessary to interface with Ziva Two’s communications systems, which in turn activated connections with the entire satellite system, eleven eyes in the sky that gave Kafari an unprecedented view of the field of war about to erupt below.

  She jabbed out the code that sent eighteen long-range missiles screaming through Jefferson’s skies. She could actually see the contrails as they gained altitude and kissed the stratosphere, high above any ground-based air-defense system. Savage satisfaction swept through her as the missiles streaked across the heavens then plunged back toward the ground.

  “Fly, you sweet little moth-winged mothers…”

  The total lack of jabber on official military and police channels, which she also monitored, was music in her ears: her missiles were literally three seconds from impact and the attack hadn’t even been noticed, yet. She sat with her finger poised over the console, ready to transmit the code that would allow her to jam the weapons
platforms and communications satellites, if somebody on the ground realized what was happening and tried to shoot them down.

  The first wave of missiles impacted.

  Gouts of flame appeared on her screen, tiny flickers as seen by POPPA’s orbital spy-eyes. Kafari said a prayer for the people trapped in those camps, because that barrage of missiles was all the help they were going to get. She hoped it was enough. Then Red Wolf said, “We’re going in!” She touched controls, brought up a different view. The camp Kafari’s strike force had targeted lay dead ahead. It had been built on the desert side of the Damisi, down in the foothills, where the only thing green was the paint on the landing field. High, electrified fences enclosed the camp, which had been designed to house close to a hundred thousand people, not counting the guards.

  The sprawling buildings, cheap barracks thrown together like tar-paper shacks, shimmered in the heat haze. Ground temperatures were hot enough to fry eggs on bare rock faces. Guard towers punctuated the high fences, jutting up every twenty meters. There were automated weapons platforms on the towers, infinite repeaters that could be triggered manually by the guards or left on automatic, to shoot at anything approaching the fence without a transmitter broadcasting on the correct frequency. A huge trench had been gouged out of the hard-baked ground, just inside the fences. The deep pit wasn’t new. Its first ten meters had been partially refilled, already.