A Desert Called Peace (73 page)

"How many have your boys hanged so far?" Carrera asked.

"Eighty-seven," Sada answered, instantly. "As of yesterday. Fortunately, they're mostly from two of the smaller tribes. Also, fortunately, they were mostly here in Ninewa where tribal affections are slightly looser."

"How did the dictator maintain control if killing a tribe member makes enemies of the entire tribe?" Carrera asked, even more puzzled than he had been before.

"Well . . . see," Sada explained. "He changed the equation. Resistance meant something between tribal culling and tribal extermination and not a man or woman in the country but believed he meant it. Therefore
that
became the ultimate wrong, risking the complete death of the tribe."

"I can't exterminate entire tribes," Carrera said.
Jesus, I've got
some
decency left.
"You have a solution?"

"Work? We have to provide work for the young men. We might also slip some money, under the table, to the leaders of the tribes we've affected."

Carrera answered, "No . . . I won't reward people for failure to control their young men. I'm willing to provide work, though."

"It'll help," Sada answered with a shrug.
And I can take care of bribing the tribal leaders, even if Patricio will not.

"Let's look at the map," Carrera suggested.

The map, marked up with grease pencils, showed the borders of the BZOR, which was a near square of about two hundred kilometers on a side. Ninewa was approximately in the center of the eastern side along the River Buranun.

"We need to build a base here," Carrera pointed to a spot just northeast of Ninewa. "I'll also need one more smaller base for each infantry cohort, though those will need to be big enough to house three times that many, eventually, and assuming the war goes the way I expect it to. Can your people handle that kind of construction?"

Sada snorted. "Back on Old Earth my people were building magnificent palaces and cities when yours were still painting themselves blue." He did some quick calculations in his head.
Let's see. An average cohort base will need to house about fifteen hundred men when it grows. At sixty square meters per man that would be ninety thousand. A square of three hundred meters on a side . . . 

"How are you planning on building your bases?" Sada asked.

"Basically square. Ditch. Earthen wall," Carrera answered. "Maybe adobe housing. Small airstrip inside for the Crickets. A full-length strip, maybe twelve-hundred meters, at the main base."

"Okay . . . that would be about one square kilometer you'll need to rent or lease—trust me, Patricio, you'll want to lease it rather than just take it—for each cohort base. A fair price, depending on the quality of the land, would be somewhere in the range of twenty to fifty thousand FSD per year for each."

"That's
all
?"

"Yes, somewhere in there. Probably on the low end provided you make it clear that the housing will stay when you leave. Then, for the walls . . . ummm . . . call it two or three thousand men employed with shovels for a month, for each base. Housing would be . . . honestly I don't know anything about housing."

"I know someone who does," Carrera answered. "Get me Tribunes Cheatham and Clean," he shouted out the office door.

"Two to three thousand each would work for the outlying bases," Carrera said. "Here in Ninewa it would have to be quite a bit larger."

"Yes," Sada agreed. "Including my brigade it would have about four times the area and twice the perimeter. Call it four to six thousand men for a month."

"That would make a big dent in the unemployment situation here in Ninewa," Carrera said. Unenthusiastically, he added, "But only for a month or so. Speaking of your men and families, has yours arrived here safely?"

"Yes, just this morning. I've taken over a couple of rooms here in the compound for them."

"We'll need to secure the families of your men as well, you know," Carrera observed.

"Just so. But the university hasn't enough space. For now, the families are safer where they are. When we build the base, we can make room for them as well and move them there."

Cheatham knocked on the door, accompanied by the Anglian, Clean. "You called us, sir?"

"Yeah . . . how much would we need in housing, presumably adobe housing, for the troops?"

"Adobe?" Clean asked, visibly interested. "As it so happens, I've always had a great interest in adobe construction. Did you know that it can be as strong as concrete and, if labor is cheap, also much, much cheaper? It's a wonderful building material for the very rich and the very poor."

It took Clean and Cheatham some days to work out the plans and the requirements. Still more time was spent in negotiations with local leaders for the leasing of land. After that it took more time for PSYOP and word of mouth advertising to assemble work crews. Within a month or so, however, about fifteen thousand of the otherwise unemployed Sumeris had found work in base construction. This was less of a drop in the bucket than it seemed as each Sumeri with money to spend created jobs for the otherwise jobless.

It helped, but not enough.

Fadeel al Nizal was a man with a problem.

Actually, I have more problems than I can count. Starting with this one.

"This one" meant Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana. And Mustafa was not a happy camper, nor even a happy troglodyte.

"You shame me for being a member of the same race," Mustafa stormed. "I gave you money, hundreds of thousand of FS drachma, and what do you show for it? Nothing!" he raged. "I've given you access to our data base to recruit your own group and what have those you have recruited done to resist the infidel? Lain around buggering each other for all that anyone can see!"

Abdul Aziz ibn Kalb, standing well off to one side, flinched even though he was not the target of the tongue lashing.

"Sheik Mustafa," Fadeel began, "I admit, we were taken by surprise by the speed of the infidel conquest. But then," and Fadeel looked around at the walls of the cave as if to say,
Aren't
you
a little surprised to find that your impregnable Pashtia, the Pashtia that did to death the might of the Volgan Empire, is reduced to this little hole in the ground?

"Don't try me, little man," Mustafa glared. "If we are here it is due to the will of Allah.
He
is the great strategist. Ours is but to fight in His cause."

"Indeed," Fadeel agreed. "And all will turn out well, even in Sumer. But we do have problems there."

"Like what?" Mustafa demanded.

"Number One is a turncoat Sumeri general named Sada. For reasons I dearly pray the Almighty will reveal to me someday, this man fought the infidel gloriously . . . and then surrendered and joined him. Worse, this Sada, the dog, took his brigade over with him."

"He is in the infidel's pay," Mustafa said, with a glare of hate. "His family must pay."

"Easier said than done, Great Prince. The turncoat's family is already beyond our reach. Those of his men will be . . . harder to identify and find. We are working on this."

"Ah, so you actually
have
done something."

"We have done what we could. I have just over one hundred future martyrs operating in Sumer. About twenty of them are in the area of the traitor, Sada. It would be more except that about half, or a bit more, of what I sent simply disappeared. I suspect he has a network of informers. And I can't eliminate the informers without knowing who they are. I can't find out who they are without getting more of my people in place. And I can't get my people in place, as long as the area crawls with informers. Only in the city of Ninewa, mostly because it is of a size that makes it impossible to identify strangers, have I been successful in infiltrating. That; and that there been a major displacement of people and disruption of society wherever there was serious fighting."

"And you have a plan for the use of what you do have?" Mustafa asked, growing visibly calmer.

"I do. Noting that everything is in the hands of the Beneficent, the Merciful, still I am prepared to begin attacks against these crusaders very soon."

"With what?"

"I have too few men to conduct a proper suicide campaign at this time," Fadeel admitted. "But I can do kidnappings, I can plant bombs, I can do some assassinations. Watch and see. There are munitions scattered unsecured all over Sumer. My people are buying these up. Very soon the invader will feel our sting."

Tariq Mohsem was one of the town's few Christians. A bit shorter than most of the Sumeri norm, and also a bit stouter as befit a normally prosperous shopkeeper, he was also one of the first merchants to reopen for business. Tariq's shop, one of Ninewa's largest before the invasion, was a general store that sold food along with some dry goods, household appliances, tools, and such.

He'd returned to find the shop looted and heavily damaged. He had some funds, not the worthless Sumeri pounds but hard currency from the FS and TU. It had been his escape money. Instead of using it to escape with his family, however, he'd decided to stay and rebuild. Factoring large in that decision had been the very forthright way the occupying forces—or liberating, for those who insisted on more aesthetic terms—had shown early on that they were intent on maintaining order. Perhaps the clearest indicator of this was the young man Tariq had found dead in the shop, though visible from the street, hanging by the neck from a cross beam—
Who would have thought a neck could stretch that far?—
and with a sign on his chest proclaiming, "Looter."

"If the invading forces provide safety and order," Tariq had told his wife, "why not stay? This is home, after all."

So, instead of using the money to flee, Tariq had hired a couple of carpenters to put his shop back in order. The rest he had used to buy food from the invaders. He had to admit, they'd charged a fair price.

"Thank God," he'd also said to his wife, "that they are, too. If we were further north, in the Anglian or FSC sector, they'd be giving the food away and no one would shop from us."

Things were going well enough, so far, too. He'd bought the food at about forty percent of what the invaders told him he could sell it for.
And don't the bastards stop by from time to time to make sure I'm not gouging, too? Of course, that doesn't stop me from taking some of the grain and trading it for other foodstuffs, which I can mark up rather more than that.

With the profits, and given that he was one of the first stores to reopen, Tariq not only hired two assistants, he also took on an armed guard for the evenings when he closed shop.

Of course, not everyone had a job yet. The six thousand or so men employed by the legion, locally, were only a fraction of those needing work. On the other hand, those six thousand with money created a certain amount of work on their own, as did the men of Sada's brigade and even the damned foreigners. In any case, Tariq was finding business picking up almost to preinvasion levels. As to whether it would drop off again, as more competition reentered the market; who could say? Tariq hadn't gotten where he was by inability to compete or to work hard. Indeed, in a freer market he expected to do rather better.

No one noticed when the tall, slender man with the oddly and unevenly shaped eyes pulled the beat up, dented and dirty white van to the front of the store. Even the lack of a license plate excited no interest; many, perhaps even most, of the automobiles operating in the town were unlicensed. Perhaps they had once had licenses; who knew?

The slender fellow had a friendly face, although anyone who saw him probably thought it seemed a bit distant. He fiddled with something in the van, something below door level. No matter, everyone in the country was still in a state of shock, even those for whom the shock was not unpleasant. Nor was there anything particularly suspicious in the driver's reaching below the dash.

Opening the van's door and stepping out, the driver simply walked into the store. No one thought it odd that he consulted his watch and left after approximately four minutes. And no one walking by the storefront connected the man departing with the parked van.

Standard military time fuse burns at a rate of forty seconds per foot. The fuse had been cut to a length of fifteen feet. Thus, between the time he reached below the dash, and subtracting a few seconds to enter Tariq's store and five minutes inside, the slender man had just over four minutes to walk away at a fairly leisurely pace. He was almost three hundred meters away when . . . 

"What the fuck was the point?" Carrera asked Sada.

"I'm not sure," the Sumeri answered. "Does it have to have a point?"

The two men, surrounded by legionaries with a few of Sada's men as well, stood in front of what had once been a store. The street was mostly still there, barring only a four foot deep crater, but the front of the store itself was gone. Indeed, much of the back was gone as well. Bodies and parts of bodies remained. Some of those parts were very small.

"Do we know how many people?"

Sada asked one of his men before answering, "At least fifty-seven. That many are more or less intact. As to the parts . . ."—he spread his arms, shrugging— ". . . hard to say."

Carrera's eyes focused on one very small part. It was a leg, small, slightly olive in tone, with a shoe on the foot. A baby girl's leg, he thought. A baby girl . . . 
like my Milagro. So fucking
what
if she was a Moslem, she was still just a baby girl. Bastards!

Sada looked at the legate, looked away quickly, and offered, "It is no shame to cry, my friend. The shame would be in doing nothing about this atrocity."

Wiping a hand across his face, which did little more than streak the dust that had gathered there, Carrera forced the sorrowful tone away and asked, bitterly, "What can we do? It's in the nature of these things that they leave little evidence."

Sada laughed grimly. "Remember what I said about us being the sort of people who become exceedingly resentful about losing family members? Well . . . I think we have here the recruiting brochures"— his hand swept the scene, taking in the bodies and parts of bodies— "to acquire some numbers of people who will do anything to get even for what's just been done to
their
family. Watch and see if I'm not right."