A Desert Called Peace (64 page)

"What was the butcher's bill, Qabaash?"

"
Amid,
we sent out ninety-seven men, nearly a full company. Only forty-three returned."

"A bitter price," Sada said. "Bitter but necessary." Sada looked at Qabaash. "You don't understand why it was necessary, do you?"

Qabaash raised his chin and shook his head. Being mostly out of the action was hard on him and very depressing. "No,
Amid
, I don't. I wish I did."

Patiently, Sada explained, "What's it worth paying to make sure the enemy doesn't sleep well at night, Qabaash? What price should we pay to make sure that he spends more of his effort watching out for a surprise attack than preparing to attack us here? You're a fine fighter, Major. You have to learn to be a thinker as well."

Command Post,
Legio del Cid
, 35/2/461 AC

"Well, it's not like I didn't
try
to accommodate them," Carrera said, watching the mass of aircraft overhead and on the other side of the river. The aircraft, a mix of C-31 and C-41 medium and heavy lift, were disgorging the better part of the 731st Airborne Brigade, Federated States Army. The air was thick with parachutes.

"You robbed t'em, t'ey t'ink," answered McNamara. "T'ree times t'ey planned a drop, t'ree times we overran and passed by t'e drop zone before t'ey could execute. An', Boss, you know as well as I do t'at planning a drop takes
time
and effort. So, yeah, t'ey're pissed at you. T'at's why t'ey stopped letting their forward support battalion help us, to slow us down so t'ey
could
make a jump . . . a 'combat' jump."

"Interesting application of decision cycle theory, anyway, Sergeant Major. First time I've heard or read of an occasion where a military organization is outmaneuvered by its
friends
because its friends just decide faster and move faster than the organization is capable of."

McNamara shrugged. Fancy theories were fine, to him, provided they didn't interfere with the actual fighting.

"Anyway, we've got a problem or, rather, several. I've got a tacit agreement with the Sumeris on the rules for this fight. The 731
^st
is not a part of that agreement. I know their commander, and he's a dickhead. Jeff Lamprey, ever heard of him?"

McNamara scratched a cheek, idly. "Name only," he answered.

"Stuffed-shirt, stick up his ass, prig," Carrera said, disdainfully. "Tall, handsome, manly . . . who happens to be a stuffed-shirt, stick up his ass prig. Not too manly, though, some say. I've been told, by people in a position to know, that when he was a captain commanding a company his wife—beautiful girl, too, they say—used to fuck his lieutenants. I don't think he ever quite recovered from that. That's one of the reasons I'm inclined to believe the story. He's the kind of guy who insists on saluting in the field and that troops should shave daily even when drinking water is short.

"Now, technically," Carrera continued, "by the contract Campos signed with us, I outrank him. I know him though and he won't listen to that. Frankly, Sergeant Major, we loathe each other at a really deep, sincere and personal level. So we are faced with the prospect of two forces trying to take the same town at the same time, with essentially no chance that the two forces will or even
can
cooperate. Hmmm . . .  what to do, what to do?"

Carrera paused, obviously thinking hard. McNamara stayed quiet for the moment, worrying about what his boss was thinking. Then Carrera nodded to himself, turned around, and entered the CP.

"Fire support, have we got an armed Dodo overhead?"

"Yes, sir. Two of them, actually."

"Good. Drop the bridge on the other side of town. Immediately."

McNamara, listening, thought,
Got to hand it to him. He cuts right to the heart of the problem and finds a solution. It might not be an
elegant
solution. It might even piss off everyone in the entire world. But he
does
come up with a solution, every time. Jesus, I see no fucking end of trouble out of this one.

Lamprey and a picked group of paratroopers hit, rolled and recovered. In an instant they had doffed their chutes, prepared their weapons, and were racing on foot to seize the one bridge over the river that led into the town.

The commander of the 731st Airborne saw a dark streak above the bridge. Even without knowing he was still pretty sure what it meant.

"Everybody, DOWN!" he shouted, while still seven or eight hundred meters away from his objective.

KABOOM!

Lamprey looked up to see several concrete sections of the bridge flying up in what looked like an attempt to achieve low orbit.

"Come on, follow me," Lamprey shouted, getting to his feet and resuming his race. He had gained perhaps another hundred meters when the bridge erupted again. Again Lamprey threw himself to the ground.

KABOOM!

"That son of a bitch, undisciplined, insubordinate
bastard
," he muttered when he reached the bridge only to discover it really didn't exist anymore.

"But,
why
? I don't understand, I really
don't
understand,
why
they dropped the bridge,
Amid
."

So far his enemy's actions had made a certain sense to Sada. He had to confess, though that this . . . 

"Makes no sense to me either, Qabaash. So it must be a trick. Move Fourth Battalion from reserve to facing the river."

"That's going to leave us stretched facing the other enemy," Qabaash objected.

"I know. But I am guessing that they dropped the bridge precisely to lull us into thinking that no attack would be coming across the river. Thus, there almost certainly
will
be an attack from across the river."

The load this time was five-hundred-pounders, twenty-four of them. Each of the other five birds in the mission carried a similar load, except for Number Four, which carried five two-thousand- pounders. Four was flying somewhere off to the left. Its bombs were programmed for several hardened targets, which did
not
include Sada's command bunker, within the town.

The navigator—who was doing double duty as the bombardier, to the extent the guided bombs even required a bombardier— announced, "Release in . . . five . . .  four . . . three . . ."

Command Post,
Legio del Cid

"—two . . . one," intoned Triste from where he stood between the bank of radios and the operational maps. There was a delay of about half a minute between his announcement of "one" and the first rumblings of huge aerial bombs exploding in the city.

"It takes a while for the bombs to hit ground," he explained, a little sheepishly, when Carrera turned an uplifted eyebrow towards him.

Carrera shrugged—a few seconds one way or the other didn't really matter under the circumstances—and returned his attention to the operational maps.

One of these, the largest scale one, Ridenhour was updating with the latest information from Thomas's headquarters, still ensconced in al Jahara. The Federated States had made rapid progress, despite the false start at the beginning of the campaign. Even now its armored columns closed on the capital of the Republic of Sumer, Babel. Whether they would lunge right into the town or wait to allow slower moving infantry to catch up and do the detailed clearing was a matter of some debate within the legion's own headquarters.

Ridenhour, himself, didn't know. He was reasonably sure that Thomas was still undecided. True, the Sumeri Army had mostly folded up whenever FSA troops had gotten close. But there had been exceptions, a few times and places where they'd fought like demons. This was usually the doing of some local commander. Let one or two of that sort be inside the capital with a good sized body of troops under his command and a bold lunge with armor into the town could turn into a disaster.

There's not a lot of difference it makes to us,
Carrera thought, with a mental shrug.
And it's not like I can affect it one way or the other.

He turned his attention away from the map that showed events he could do nothing about and towards the local map that detailed the actions of his own force.There, things appeared to be going pretty smoothly. Third and Fourth Cohorts were holding position. First, Second, Fifth and Sixth were either in or moving to their jump off positions south of the town.

And,
he thought,
since there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do here, I may as well go forward and at least
see
the action and be seen.

"Mitch, Soult; grab your radios. We're going up to see First Cohort move in."

Assembly Area
Principe Eugenio

Corporal Cruz, PFC Sanchez, and the two new men just arrived a few days prior, Robles—younger brother to the Cazador sergeant strangled on Hill 1647—and Correa, got as low and as forward into shelter as the shallow trench permitted.

"Any time now," Cruz said, after consulting his watch. "Any time n—."

To the east, the sky lit up as one aerially delivered bomb after another slammed in, disintegrating buildings and the men those buildings contained. Cruz and the other three, even at this distance, were buffeted and shaken by the bombardment. Bits of hot metal, some of them substantial, flew overhead or careened into the friendly side of the scraped-out trench.

The bombardment went on and on, averaging one major explosion every twelve to fifteen seconds. Cruz lost track of the time. Even before it was finished, every mortar and gun of the legion opened up, lighting up both the open desert skyline and the interior of Ninewa.

Anticipating that the regular bombardment would stay fairly regular, Cruz waited until one of the really big blasts had gone off, waited a few prudent seconds for the metal shards to either pass over or come to rest, and stuck his head up for a risky look.

"It's all smoke and fire," he shouted to his men. "I can't see everything on the edge of town for the smoke, but what I can see has been better than half obliterated." As he watched he saw a substantial building fall to the ground, pouring off bricks as it came down.

He ducked again and just in time as another aerial bomb went off.

Between the distinct sounds of the bombing, Cruz made out the sound of engines, a lot of them, swinging in from the left until they were directly behind him. Then the engines began to grow louder as they moved toward the town, coming closer.

The mechanized cohort had feinted first to the west of the town, then—leaving behind one century to maintain the deception—the rest had turned around and swung wide to three-quarters circle Ninewa again and take up a position to the east. There, behind the First Cohort, they lined up, the remaining three mechanized centuries on line, tanks leading, followed by the Ocelots carrying the infantry.

Perez stood in the hatch of his tank, scanning ahead with his eyes while del Rio, below in the turret, scanned through the tank's thermal imager. Jorge Mendoza just drove, his eyes and crown only just sticking up out of the cramped driver's compartment.

Mendoza felt his heart begin to pound when he heard the century signifer call over the radio, "Roll."

Perez acknowledged the order and echoed it, adding in the directions, "Jorge, aim for those chemlights ahead and stop when we reach them." Mendoza put the tank into gear and began rolling forward, picking up speed quickly as he went. The tank lurched into a shallow trench and then, as Mendoza applied the gas, pulled out of it. It stopped on the other side, rocking back and forth for a moment.

Perez looked around until his eyes rested on a small group of infantry, just rising out of the scraping. "Come on, come on; climb aboard. We haven't got all day." Doubting the infantry could hear him, Perez used his arms to signal that it was time.

Cruz saw the tanker frantically waving for him and his men to climb aboard. He'd never trained on this, but it seemed straightforward enough: climb on, hang on for dear life and hope that the damned thing doesn't fire the main gun until you can climb the hell off.

"Mount up, boys," he ordered over the diesel's roar. "Sanchez, take the tail."

Cruz climbed aboard first, arms grasping for purchase and legs scrambling and slipping on road wheels and treads. He eyed the reactive armor, uncertainly. Rather, he was absolutely
certain
he didn't want to be anywhere near the damned rolling target if it took a hit and one of the explosive bricks went off.

Then again, if it takes a hit does it really
matter
?
Probably not; probably not even a little. Just be adding insult to—mortal—injury.

Once safely mounted, Cruz reached down an arm to help the next man, Robles, climb up. With Sanchez pushing and Robles pulling they soon had Correa up. Correa and Robles helped Sanchez while Cruz tried to speak to the tank commander.

"I'm Perez," the sergeant shouted over the engine's roar. "We're going to close to within two hundred meters of the edge of town, firing the machine guns like maniacs. Then you grunts get off, along with the rest of your people and clear the edge. After that, we'll lead and you support."

"Why just the machine guns?" Cruz asked.

"Son, you
don't
want to be on this tank if we fire the main gun," Perez answered. "It . . . hurts."

"I understand, Sergeant Perez," Cruz shouted back. "Just give me the high sign when it's time to get off."

Perez replaced his combat vehicle crewman's helmet and said something, presumably to the driver. Cruz barely had his men positioned when the tank took off again with a shudder and a lurch.

Mendoza was probably the loneliest man in or on the tank. Perez had del Rio for close company. Even the grunts on back could see each other. All he had was his lonely, isolated compartment . . . that, and the intruding memory of a beautiful light brown girl in a white hat and yellow print dress singing "Ave Maria," in a church choir.