A Desert Called Peace (86 page)

Following Annan's flight path, the shuttle stopped off at the local UN supervisory office in
Ciudad
Balboa. The bureaucrats there had nothing to add. It struck the Marine major that the guards on the office seemed even more slovenly and undisciplined than was the UN norm. Still, it was close enough to that norm to excite no real interest. After refueling the shuttle from local stocks, and seeing that his men were given a decent meal and some rest, the ship took off heading east.

The shuttle was
not
equipped to scan the jungle below. Even if it had been, it might well not have noticed the several dozen armed men on horseback over whom it flew, riding hell for leather, westward, beneath the thick triple canopy.

The helicopter was easy enough to find; it had landed in the open and there it still was. When the shuttle descended to a leaf- and grass- churning landing, the major and his men debarked. They found the helicopter, along with twenty-two insect-eaten heads on stakes in a circle around it. Of the high admiral's body, or those of the eighteen Marines who had accompanied him, there was not a trace. The bodies of the three-man crew, or what was left of them after ants,
antaniae
, and buzzards had taken their share, were found right by the helicopter.

The nearby village was abandoned. No footprints told where the villagers had gone. Prints of horse hooves, some dozens of them, led off to the east but disappeared in the sodden jungle. The major was about to organize and send off search parties when he received a distress call from the UN supervisory office, now some hundreds of kilometers away.

The call for help ended almost as soon as it began. By the time the shuttle arrived back at the office it was nothing more than a corpse- draped, smoking ruin.

The shuttle landed nearby. This was a mistake.

Among the weapons found in the supervisory office's armory had been a single sample of a very special type. This was a magazine-fed, bolt action rifle in 14.5mm, with its own limited visibility scope, recoil absorption system and a muzzle brake to further reduce the otherwise shoulder-shattering recoil of the piece. For all that, it was no different in principle from any of the bolt-action rifles in use on Earth. It was this simplicity that recommended the weapon to both Belisario and the UN, though the latter used it exclusively for hunting mammoth, not men nor their machines.

Belisario lay now beside the sniper he had chosen, a
cholo
from Panama with a deserved reputation as a marksman. The
cholo
's, or Indian's, name was Pedro.

"Pedro, can you hit the gas tank?" Belisario asked.

"No,
señor
," the
indio
answered. "I don't even know where it will be. But I can hit an engine, no problem."

"Make it the engine then,
compadre
. But
make
it the engine. We can't afford a miss."

The pair lay in a shack overlooking the UN office. More particularly, their field of fire covered the marked, concrete shuttle landing pad to one side of that office. What they would do if the shuttle landed elsewhere, Belisario didn't know. His men were scattered in small groups in other buildings. Perhaps that would be enough.

He'd told them no cooking fires, an order that had not gone over particularly well. He hoped they'd listen, but had less than absolute confidence that they would. What he could do about it he didn't know. Rather, he hoped he didn't know.

Will it come to that?
Belisario wondered.
Will I someday end up having to shoot some of my own men if they won't follow orders? God . . . if there is a God . . . deliver me from this, please.

His thoughts were interrupted by the whine of the UN shuttle circling the area before coming in for a very soft, though leaf and dust churning, landing.

Belisario was just rising and turning his head toward Pedro to give the order to fire when the
cholo
fired
sua sponte
 . . . and immediately screamed and rolled from the gun, clutching a broken shoulder. So much for recoil absorption systems. The muzzle blast half-stunned Belisario, knocking him right back on his arse.

"What the—?"

On hands and knees, shaking his head, Belisario crawled back to the low window through which Pedro had engaged the shuttle. As he neared the opening, he heard and felt the familiar blasts of his own men's muzzle loaders, combined with the rattle of machine guns. Belisario hoped at least
some
of those machine guns were among those he and his followers had captured at the UN's office armory.

The first thing Belisario saw from the window was smoke. True to his word, Pedro had struck an engine. The engine had then caught fire, a fire which spread to other parts of the shuttle. The entire machine seemed about to burst into flames.

While Belisario watched, it
did
burst into flame, the fireball catching several of the UN Marines, sending them running as shrieking human torches. The Cochean felt no satisfaction at this, but only pity and perhaps even a bit of regret. He regretted, too, that any equipment that might have been on the shuttle was now irretrievably lost.

A near miss knocked bits of wood off of the wooden window frame causing Belisario to duck. Taking a moment to steel his soul he returned to his observation point. There were no more near misses, however. Instead, with his head now rapidly clearing from the shock of Pedro's muzzle blast, Belisario saw a dozen or fourteen—it was hard to be sure under the circumstances—UN Marines, cowering at the edges of the burned area. He suspected that those, plus the ones he had seen burn, were all that had gotten out of the shuttle. Those survivors were tightly pinned by the machine gun fire coming from Belisario's looted weapons.

Between the machine gun and rifle fire, plus the real fire from the shuttle, first one, then another, then a group of three of the Marines dropped their weapons and stood up, arms raised high. It wasn't
their
bloody fight and if the locals were willing to take prisoners they were willing to become prisoners.

Belisario was still in the first phase of a very steep upward learning curve. He'd never thought to arrange for a signal to cease fire. Fortunately, his followers were not cold-blooded killers but simple farmers and ranchers and artisans who would kill only most reluctantly. Fire ceased as the gunners and riflemen saw that the Marines were, in fact, trying to surrender. As the fire let up, and seeing those trying to surrender standing unharmed, the rest of the UN troops quickly put down their weapons and stood, as well.

Saying, "I'll send someone for you, Pedro," Belisario left the room and walked out of the shack towards the UN Marines. He was met, not too far from the burning shuttle, by one very shaken Botswanan major with his arms raised high over his head.

It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people.

—John 11:50

Las Mesas
, Balboa, 28/2/462 AC

Was there ever a sweeter sounding word? Cruz was
home
!

Admittedly, it was only for four weeks leave and, even worse, he had an allegedly nasty leadership selection course to run through, to be followed by more advanced training. But he was
home
, he was a sergeant, and at last he could marry his lovely and sweet Caridad.

Actually, there was one sweeter word . . . or rather, one sweeter phrase. Standing beside him in a white dress—well, she was still,
technically
, a virgin—surrounded by both their families and with Cruz wearing the new, black and silver dress uniform of the legion that he'd been issued at
Fuerte
Cameron, Cara had said, "I do."

Feast followed and honeymoon, altogether too brief a one, followed feast. As for the honeymoon . . . well, newlyweds are entitled to a certain amount of privacy.

It was just after midnight, with the lights of the city washing out the stars overhead. Under the bright streetlamps, Caridad Morales- Herrera de Cruz fought to keep control of her voice. But it was just so damned unfair. She and her Ricardo had barely had time to get to know each other again before he had had to go.

I refuse to cry. I refuse. I refuse.

She cried anyway.

Around the young couple, hundreds of other Cazador hopefuls and their nearest kin awaited the buses that would bring them to the nearest thing to Hell man's imagination could create on Terra Nova. Many a young girl and elderly mother wept. Cazador School had gained a well-deserved reputation for misery and danger in its brief existence.

Cruz stiffened and Cara began softly to cry with the sound of the first horn. Cruz pulled her close, stroking her long midnight black hair and murmuring words of comfort into her ear. Around them, unnoticed, others left behind by loved ones joined in a low floating wail.

A long line of students wound from the class headquarters building down to the tiny unkempt parade field. To either side of the students CIs roamed like ravenous beasts of prey.

Standing at rigid attention, shorn of hair, rank, and the external trappings of personal dignity, Cruz listened attentively to the CIs' grandiloquent vituperation.
Might come in useful someday.

The students had managed a couple of hours' sleep on the buses to Camp Gutierrez. No breakfast had been offered, as a matter of policy. Cruz listened to the rumbling of his deprived stomach:
Hey, asshole, don't you remember me? You know, the one you're supposed to fucking
feed
? Your
stomach
?

As classmates ahead of him completed their in-processing, Cruz neared the school headquarters building. Ahead was a large curved sign, yellow with black letters, held up by columns.
CAZADOR,
Cruz read. He could see concrete pyramidal blocks lining both sides of the trail past the sign. A student did pushups, hands on the ground, feet elevated on the concrete at each block.

The rain began to fall. Still, the students stood and marched forward at attention. The rain lifted and the bright Balboan sun turned the sodden uniforms to clinging, stinking, steamy prisons. Cruz passed under the
CAZADOR
sign.

"Get your feet up on that block,
Cazador
! Fifteen for the ones who preceded you," commanded an impersonal CI. Cruz mounted his feet on the block and began to perform push ups, as the others before him had. His arms pumped out the pushups smoothly.

Turning his head to one side Cruz saw an inscription on the concrete block opposite. It was from the Bible: "And his meat was locusts: Matthew 3:4." Below that were written the names of three Cazador students who had lost their lives in training. Cruz moved up to the next block as the flow of students moved onward. The inscription Cruz read now was: "And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered: Matthew 4:2." More names of the dead were proclaimed below that quote. "I came not to send peace, but a sword: Matthew 10:34" followed that.

Hours later, still unfed and wanting sleep, Cruz and his newly assigned "
Cazador Compadre
," Rafael Montoya, a lanky boy from
Valle de las Lunas
, emerged from the headquarters building with all that they would be allowed to possess as Cazador students. A huge pile of sandwiches, cookies, cakes and other goodies fed the ants and birds in the field behind the headquarters.

Already Cruz's uniform was beginning to hang on him loosely. The purely technical aspects of Cazador School were behind him— map reading, the steps in troop-leading procedures, radio communications, physical fitness tests, and so on. He could do all those things perfectly well before coming here. But—and this made it special—all of it had been done on under an hour and a half's sleep per night and with a constant pain in the belly.

Almost a fifth of those who had begun the course with Cruz had already dropped out or been dropped. None had yet been killed, though two had been injured badly enough in the hand-to-hand combat pits that they had to be recycled. These did scut work in a separate compound called, none of the students knew quite why, the "Gulag."

This was the first patrol. The patrol, really a large squad, was halted in a cigar-shaped perimeter. Men looked out to all sides, fighting to keep their eyes open. The CI took a position in the center, watching Cruz more closely than Cruz knew. Mosquitoes buzzed in ears, taking their part of each student's daily donation of a pint of blood to the jungle pests. Outside the perimeter foul-mouthed
antaniae
murmured, "
mnnbt
 . . . 
mnnbt
 . . . 
mnnbt
." No one really worried about the
antaniae
. They were too nasty to eat and, while their mouths were septic, they were a cowardly species which, for the most part, posed danger of infection only to the very young.

"Montoya. Goddammit, Montoya, wake the fuck up!" Cruz whispered as he jostled his assigned buddy.

Montoya snapped up with a start. "I wasn't sleeping, Centurion."

"Save the lies for the CI. It's me, Cruz. Pull out your poncho and put it over us."

Cruz took a red filtered flashlight and his acetated map in his hands and joined Montoya under the cover of the poncho. Unheard by either, the CI crept to within a couple of feet to listen.

"Cazador Cruz, you have failed this patrol." The CI laid his judgment out without cushioning. Cruz hung his head in shame. The CI then proceeded to explain precisely why Cruz had failed: improper contingency plan so that when the perimeter had been hit, Montoya hadn't known where to take the patrol to link up; inadequate supervision on Montoya's part after Cruz's departure leading to sleeping troops who couldn't detect the approaching enemy, failure to navigate properly so that the patrol had to stop too close to the objective leading, so the CI said, to interception by a random security sweep by the unit at the objective. Of course the security sweep hadn't been random at all, but Cruz couldn't know that.