A Desert Called Peace (47 page)

"Son of a bitch!" Carrera cursed as he read through the dispatch sent this morning from the FS embassy in
Ciudad
Balboa. He looked rather pleased when he first began to read since the missive contained agreement that his legion would be hired at the agreed price by the FS for the coming campaign. As he had read further though . . .

"What is it, Patricio? What's wrong?" Lourdes asked.

"That motherfu . . . it's Campos. He'll hire us on but not for the mission we originally agreed to. Instead of going to the north with our equipment going by sea and then basing out of al Jahara, we have to go south—by air, mind you, which is much more expensive—and establish ourselves in Yezidistan. Then we have to fight through to where an FS airborne brigade is going to jump in, and continue operations with them until we link up with coalition forces somewhere north of Babel."

He kept reading before admitting, "Oh. Well, it isn't that bad. We get the airborne brigade's artillery and service support battalions flown in and attached to us in advance in Yezidistan. And he's offering to allow us to cost-plus the extra money we'll have to spend to get the Volgans to fly us in over what it would have cost for us to go by sea."

"So you will actually make more money than you planned?"

"Ummm . . . maybe. No telling what we'll face or what we'll lose. And I've been in those mountains before. They practically defend themselves, at least as long as they're not being defended by Yezidis. Yezidis are a net minus to combat power.

"It's going to be tough fighting, though. They're also moving up the date by a week and I am not sure we can have the cold weather gear we'll need on hand by then. Iffy. Lourdes, would you assemble the staff please? Key members only."

She was about to go, then remembered the phrase "tough fighting." That worried her. So, instead of going to use the telephone to spread the word, she locked the door to Carrera's office and went back to stand beside his chair. Then, somewhat to his surprise, she rotated the chair to face her. She dropped to her knees and began to undo his belt.

"This won't take long," she said, "I'm getting better at it. And I want to take every chance there is to remind you to come home to me when the fighting is done . . . and not to let yourself get killed."

Near Caridad's home,
Las Mesas,
Balboa,
12/1/461 AC

Ricardo Cruz leaned against a tree in a secluded spot by the creek that fed Cara's family's farm. He and the girl were asymmetrically undressed, her with her top off and him lacking trousers. She knelt on the trousers so as to leave no tell-tale dirt scuffs as her head bobbed rhythmically back and forth, lips locked in a tight, and, since it was her first occasion, rather odd feeling "O."

Cruz had returned home on leave, prior to deploying over to Sumer with the legion. Before returning home, he stopped off at a small jewelry shop on Avenida Central in
Ciudad
Balboa and purchased a ring. It hadn't been anything amazing, as far as engagement rings went. Still, when he had shown it to Cara and asked her to be his wife she had seemed to think it a marvel equal to the Anglian crown jewels. Naturally, as a well bred and brought up young man, he had asked Cara's parents' permission to marry her, after she had indicated no reluctance on her part. They, weighing his prospects, seeing that he had already been accelerated in rank past most of his peers, and liking him in general, had agreed and discreetly suggested the new couple take a walk somewhere they could plan the future. Well, Cara's parents had been young once, too.

Planning for the future, when you're that young and that in love, means little more than finding a secluded spot and racing to undress.

Ricardo had originally wanted to make love. Cara had not exactly refused, but had made what she thought was a reasonable counteroffer, a little something the girls in her high school sometimes gossiped over and sometimes bragged upon. He'd agreed, she'd tried and found that, while it was an acquired . . . errr . . . taste, it was a taste fairly easily acquired. The other taste was not so easily acquired but she'd managed. Twice. This was number three and . . . well . . . why not?

Besides,
she thought,
if those groans and moans are truthful I
own
him now. Can this little thing really feel as good as all that. Hmmm,

She looked up, smiled shyly and whispered, "Ricardo, I love you. So . . . if you want to make love . . ."

He'd started to lift her up, if only so he could lay her down again on the mossy bank. And then he froze in internal confusion.

I am going to war and I may not be coming back.
Too, he remembered something his section leader had told the men once:
"Some day we all must die. Whether our lives will have meant anything depends on how we have lived them. Have we done well by those who cared for us, those for whom we were responsible? Have we done our duty? Who, among the innocent have we harmed? Who have we helped? How is the world better for our having lived? I think God will want to know. I think He'll ask."

And then what if she gets pregnant and I get killed? That would be a hard thing to inflict on her and the child both, insurance and survivor's benefits notwithstanding.

Cruz whispered back. "I love you, too,
queridisima
. But I am going to war soon. We don't know yet what will happen. I hope I'll come back. But I don't
know
that I will. We'll wait then. Maybe when I return we can continue that conversation. For now . . ."

Understanding, Cara smiled again, bent her head, and continued her bobbing.

The blue and white painted Air Balboa BG-47 bobbed up and down along the taxiway as it approached the terminal. On one side of its designated gate awaited a similar aircraft, on the other a chartered Volgan LI-68 was already boarding.

Some distance away, at the cargo terminal, teams of men, some civilians and others in the uniform of the
Legio del Cid
, loaded wide- bodied cargo aircraft—a mix of FS military, FS civilian, Balboan civilian and more Volgan military under charter—with the wheeled vehicles of the legion. Since some of those aircraft bays stood seventy feet above the tarmac, requiring that the wheels be hoisted that distance into the air on self-mobile elevators, the loading was sometimes rather precarious.

The Balboan airport was capable of receiving mid-size airships, of course. But the debarkation airport in Yezidistan was not. This ruled out using LTA craft to move any of the brigade, despite the potential cost savings.

Parilla and Carrera stood off to one side, in a pair together and separate from the confusion around them. Carrera was used to the apparent confusion of a major deployment. Parilla was not and looked plainly concerned over it.

"Relax, Raul. This is so normal that it is the very essence of routine for something like this."

Parilla, despite this, did not seem to relax.

Carrera watched as a centurion stopped one three-ton truck before it nearly went over the side of an elevating loader. The centurion walked briskly to the driver's door of the truck, opened it, hauled the driver out with both fists and then held him in the air seven stories above the ground while shaking him and cursing. The centurion didn't drop the driver, however, but put his feet back on the ramp, pushed him back into the cab, forced him to slide over. Then the centurion climbed in himself to show how the damned thing was supposed to be done.

Parilla winced at seeing this. To Carrera it was . . . well, in small details, at least, he thought the centurions ought to have a certain latitude.

"Are we going to make it, Patricio?" Parilla asked. Carrera had never shut him out—even consulted with him frequently—but neither man had any doubt as to who was really in charge. Nonetheless, Carrera always treated Parilla as his unquestioned superior in public and a good friend in private. Politeness cost nothing, after all.

"I think so, Raul. We were lucky to have the freighters stopped before the Volgans actually began putting our armor aboard. They're going to fly the stuff into Yezidistan directly from the airport near the factory, all sixteen tanks and forty-four Ocelots, plus eight extras for floats, two tanks and six Ocelots. The other twenty-two still come here by ship, for training, of course. I'm still worried as hell about the cold weather gear, though. Those mountain passes are fucking freezing this time of year."

Parilla gave an involuntary shiver. "How badly off are we?"

Without inflection, Carrera answered, "So far we've been able to find mid-weight sleeping bags for every man, Anglian surplus, and about ten thousand heavy wool blankets for when we find out that a mid-weight sleeping bag just won't do sometimes. The Misrani tents we have will be good for summer or winter since they've got a good heavy liner to them, though with that desert pink color they'll stand out like sore thumbs whether it snows or not. The south of the country isn't desert, after all. Stoves are allegedly en route. We'll see."

"God I hate the cold." Parilla shivered in anticipation, despite Balboa's oppressive heat.

"So do I," Carrera agreed. "In any case, balaclavas have been ordered, good wool ones from Helvetia, but the order won't be filled for about ten days—ten cold fucking days, I expect—after the tail end of the legion arrives. Same deal and same source on the polypropylene-lined leather gloves. We have found some really neat polypro mittens that allow the troops to peel back the part covering the fingers for fine detailed work, but in a cold wind they'll be pretty worthless, too. Harrington's looking for leather shells to cover the mittens. Nobody had winter boots available for immediate delivery in the quantity we need and the boots we were offered were almost no better than the jungle boots the men already have. That scares me. I foresee a lot of trench foot in our future unless Harrington can come through on the boots. I told him I didn't care if the styles match, just so long as they are good, serviceable, winter boots. Maybe that will help. Then again, part of our problem is that most of the troops have shorter, wider feet than those found in all the places that make winter boots.

"On the plus side, we
have
gotten twenty-thousand sets of polypro underwear. It's already in Yezidistan and being issued, first thing, as the troops debark from the aircraft. Most of it will be too big but better too big than too small. I've had a local company take five thousand white bed sheets and convert them to camouflaged pullover smocks. Better than nothing."

"We're going be cold for a while then," Parilla commented.

"Very."

"Wish we'd had time to acclimatize the men to cold weather," Parilla said.

Was there a touch of rebuke in his voice? Carrera thought so but whether it was directed at him or not was an open question.

Parilla's aide de camp came up to the pair. "Sir," he said to the nominal senior, "the aircraft chief stewardess tells me they are ready to board you now."

"You're sure we should fly separately?" Parilla asked of Carrera.

"Absolutely," Carrera answered. "In the first place, God never intended for man to fly. Worse, He has an odd sense of humor. If one of those things comes down with both of us on it, the legion will be fucked. Go on,
Duce
. I'll be on the flight right behind you."

A
bombero
band stood at attention on the tarmac playing a martial tune, one heavy on the brass and drums. The legion's main band, the pipes and drums, were already long departed and guarding the headquarters in Yezidistan.

From the movable stairway nestled against the Air Balboa jet, Parilla made a good show of turning, smiling for the cameras, and waving at the crowd of families and well-wishers bidding farewell to yet more of their soldiers. Behind him the line of mostly hung-over men waiting to board bunched briefly at the halt.

Unseen in the crowd, Lourdes waved back with her right hand. She hadn't seen Patricio since he had left the terminal lobby a few minutes after Parilla.

While Lourdes waved with her right, her left was busy catching tears in a handkerchief. Raul Parilla's elderly wife put an arm around Lourdes' narrow waist.

"I have never done this either," the older woman confided. "I am frightened for them."

Lourdes began to cry more loudly. "I am frightened for
me.
"

"I know, dear. I know."

Standing not far away, a younger woman, affianced to legion Private First Class Ricardo Cruz started to bawl as soon as she saw Lourdes' tears. Seeing Cara, Parilla's wife made a motion for her to join them. Then, standing there in the lobby, the three women hugged each other and had a good, long cry.

Under the glare of the portable lights, the last of a dozen rented semi-tractors carrying Misrani Army tents pulled away from the unloading area on their way to the legion's bivouac site near Mangesh, Yezidistan. This was about thirty miles to the north and perhaps five miles from the dividing line between Sumeri controlled Yezidistan and the Yezidi safe area that had been guaranteed by the Federated States eleven years before, following the Oil War.

Despite the bitter cold the unloading crews sweated with the strain. Their breath made little horizontal evergreens of frost in the air. Nearby, Kuralski and his Yezidi counterpart, Captain Mesud, stood to one side while waiting for the Volgan LI-68s that would be flying in, among other things, a load of rather poorly made but at least warm cold-weather boots that had been stolen from Volgan army stores years before and offered to Harrington once the need was made known. Along with the boots were coming some tons of ammunition, a portion of a huge store that had been offered by the newly reunited Sachsen Reich from what had once been held by then nominally independent North Sachsen. This, too, would go to join the growing stockpile of supplies and equipment building in the middle of Yezidistan. Packaged field rations from Anglia, Gaul, the Federated States, and other places arrived at intervals as well. No rations would be coming from Zion as Kuralski had been warned about Army of Zion rations, canned goat with the hair still on it, and kosher to ensure near tastelessness. Besides, the one tasty, for certain values of "tasty," item of food in Zioni rations,
Shoug
, was a mix of ground peppers ranging from "Holy Shit Peppers" to "Joan of Arc Peppers," with a very small admixture of "Satan Triumphant Peppers." That way layeth logisticide.