The Coward's Way of War (51 page)

He glared over towards the object of her ire, seventeen men and nine women, squatting on the ground with their hands firmly secured behind their backs with plastic ties.  They were naked, even the women, and guarded by armed and dangerous American soldiers.  Two dead bodies lay to one side of the park, an example of what happened to those who disobeyed orders.   He had no intention of taking any chances, not after watching one of his men die because he had allowed a figure in a full black veil too close to him, just before the suicide belt had detonated. 

Four of the men had been survivors from a SANG regiment the Americans had overrun, the ones lucky enough to survive several days of bombing and then a violent attack that had smashed through their defence line and took the city.  They’d managed to surrender and, after complying with Doug’s instructions, they had been secured and told to wait until a POW transport arrived to take them away.  The others had been in a bus when they’d run right into an American patrol and had been detained.  The stories they’d told – they had claimed to be driving out of the city in hopes of escaping the chaos – hadn't quite added up.  They had had no children with them. 

“You cannot leave naked women in full view of everyone who happens by,” the officer insisted.  She was from a Civil Affairs unit, sent in to make contact with the town’s officials and prepare them for a peaceful transfer of power...or so she’d said.  After the Americans had taken the town, using heavy weapons on anything that even looked like it was going to resist, he doubted that there would be much peace in the future.  “Don’t you know what their own people would do to them?”

“I don’t care,” Doug snarled.  How
dare
this chit of a girl come up to him and start telling him how to do his job?  “We gave these people, these people who are defending a regime that wrecked havoc on our country, clear instructions.  These people chose to ignore those instructions and so they will pay the price!  I will not put my people in danger and if that means some fucking ragheads get their feelings bruised, so
fucking
what?”

“Sergeant...”

“You come into this city and act as if you understand everything,” Doug growled.  “How many of my men are you prepared to see die because we didn't take proper precautions?  I’ve an idea for you; why don’t you accept that this godforsaken country is populated by people who have no idea how to fight in a honourable manner and that that disqualifies them from being treated like honourable enemies?  I will not put my men at risk to satisfy your delusions about the proper way to wage war.”

Her face darkened.  “At least let me move the women to a building,” she insisted.  “They don’t deserve to be out in the open like that.”

Doug looked over towards the women.  They were – the younger ones, at least – remarkably pretty, but they looked terrified.  They all had their eyes lowered, staring towards the ground, with their hair dangling down to provide what cover they could to their breasts.  They had all been wearing veils when they’d been captured, something he had never been able to understand.  Any delusions he might have had about women being inherently inferior had been knocked out of him by Lindsey, yet these women had accepted their treatment without complaint.  They lived in a country where they had to have a male guardian supervising their lives; they couldn't drive a car, vote in elections or even take part in any form of public life.  And now, despite not having chosen to be stripped and left in public, their relatives would try to kill them to remove the shame they would feel.   He didn't understand why they tolerated it at all.  If he’d treated Lindsey like that, his wife would have cut off his balls...

The thought of his wife reminded him that she would not have approved of tormenting the girls, however much it was necessary.  Lindsey would have insisted that he treat them decently, at least as long as he didn't know they were terrorists. She would never have allowed him to...he felt a hot flash of shame, something that almost brought tears to his eyes.  His wife might well be dead – no one had told him if she was still alive – and he was betraying her memory.  It felt almost like a perverse form of adultery.

“You may move them to a safe building,” he conceded, reluctantly.  “Take some infantrymen and check the building out
thoroughly
before occupying it, then move them in and keep them secured.  The POW transport should be along soon enough and they can be moved to the POW camp.”

He ignored the woman’s thanks and strode off to check on his men.  Two of them were leering at the girls rather than watching the surrounding area and he chewed them out at great length, reproving them for not keeping their eyes on the job.  “You can stare at women later when we get a proper base,” he bellowed, knowing that most soldiers had a semi-illicit stash of porn somewhere in their personnel belongings.  “If you lose your concentration and someone sneaks up on you, I promise I’ll put you back together with tweezers just so I can have the pleasure of kicking your ass!”

Buraidah was a reasonable-sized city on the way to Riyadh, one that the Saudis had desperately been trying to prepare for war when the American forces had rolled in and taken the town.  Airborne forces had seized Qassim Regional Airport, while elements of the 3
rd
Infantry Division had secured the road links leading in and out of the city before hammering away at the defenders.  The Saudis had put up a savage fight – it turned out that the SANG had moved in several brigades, while the religious police had also shipped in thousands of foreign volunteers – and parts of the city now looked like Beirut, after several decades of civil war.  No one had taken any chances; if any building had held an enemy strongpoint or fighting position, it had been unceremoniously levelled.  The remaining defenders had either died in place or tried to surrender.  Not all of the surrenders had been accepted.

They’d found some oddities too, he knew.  A number of guest-workers – Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Palestinians and even a handful of Egyptians and Europeans – had been taken outside the city by the SANG and summarily shot.  The brief investigation by the war crimes assessment team had reported that many of the women had been raped before they’d been executed.  The handful of surviving guest-workers within the city had reported that their comrades had just been taken away, but they’d been concealed by their employers.  The employers had acted more like owners, at least in Doug’s view, yet they’d saved lives. 

He’d passed it up the chain to higher authority, but he’d received nothing in response, apart from a blanket order to prevent any further massacres if possible.  A team of intelligence officers had flown in – the airport had rapidly been converted into a reinforcement hub, using commercial aircraft that had been pressed into service – and started to examine the dead bodies, yet they’d kept their findings to themselves.  They wouldn’t share anything with a lowly Sergeant.

An hour passed slowly as American units rotated through the city and back out on the road to Riyadh.  Doug spent the time checking on the occupied houses within the city – they’d taken over a small compound that had once belonged to a wealthy Saudi businessman, who had apparently fled to Europe when the chaos began – and supervising his men.  The city might be quiet at the moment, but there were over six hundred thousand people living within the city – even after the battle – and it could turn nasty very quickly. 

“You really need some time in your bunk, Sergeant,” Captain Taylor said, as Doug reported back to him after making a check on another occupied house.  “The city will still be here tomorrow.”

Doug said nothing.  Captain Taylor was young and keen, something Doug could barely face at the moment.  He’d wondered vaguely if the female officer – he couldn't remember her name – had filed an official complaint about him, but nothing had materialised.  Oddly, he found that rather reassuring; it would be typical of the high command, terrified of bad publicity, to yank him out of the formation if there was the slightest hint of wrongdoing.  He knew that he’d done what was necessary, yet he also knew that someone at the rear might not be so understanding about it, not when faced with the prospect of bad press.

“I cannot sleep, sir,” he admitted.  He felt tired, but it was a kind of mental tiredness, not physical.  He kept thinking about his wife.  Surely, he told himself, they would have told him if she had died, yet he knew that the system rarely worked that well.  He remembered a young soldier, killed in a sharp firefight in Iraq, who had kept receiving parcels from home long after his death.  The system had snarled up and the parcels had been delayed.  “We’re too exposed out here and I cannot sleep.”

“Get into that bed in the next room and snatch some sleep,” Captain Taylor ordered.  “I’ll wake you up in a few hours myself.”

“Yes, sir,” Doug said.  There was no other response to an order.  He stumbled into the next room – a fancy room that, he imagined, had once held the owner’s son – and collapsed onto the bed.  He barely had time to draw the picture of Lindsey from his pocket before his eyes closed and he fell asleep.

He felt little better when the Captain woke him, five hours later, and ordered him to get some chow.  Doug swallowed several retorts – all of which would have gotten him court-martialled – and obeyed, pausing long enough to pick up the picture of Lindsey and stare down at it.  Lindsey had hated that picture – he'd taken it at a moment when she’d been off-guard – yet he loved it, for it showed her smiling at him.  The tiny imperfections that ruined it in her eyes were just part of its charm. He put the photo back where it belonged and headed down to the makeshift dining room, where the cook was handing out MRE packs.  Doug joined in the rumble of good-natured grumbling and ate most of his, trading some of the contents with the other soldiers. Oddly, he almost felt human again.

An hour afterwards, he found himself riding in a Humvee and taking a platoon out on patrol.  One lesson the US Army had learned from Iraq was that it was vitally important to keep a clear presence on the streets, particularly in the early hours after occupying a population centre.  The Saudi population hadn't engaged in the mass looting that had characterised the occupation of many Iraqi cities, but he was sure that that was just a matter of time.  Buraidah was a city of contrasts, where wealthy men co-existed uneasily with poorer folk, some of whom would probably see the collapse of the government as a chance to loot.  Doug didn't blame them – the city’s slums were appalling – but order had to be maintained.  They had permission to shoot looters on sight.  Word had gotten around that the Americans were trigger-happy and, thankfully, there were few people on the streets.

He caught sight of a group of Saudi youths – all young men – standing on the corner and scowled at them.  They replied with thumbs-up, something he knew to be insulting in the Middle East, and a hail of verbal insults.  Like many other Americans who had served in Iraq, Doug had picked up enough Arabic to know exactly what they were saying, insults that were unique to the region.  He muttered a command to the driver and the makeshift turrets swung around to cover the youths, who scattered and vanished into the alleyways.

“Let them hate, so long as they fear,” he muttered, and returned his attention to the road.  “Who cares what they think?”

The small convoy turned a corner and glided past the wreckage of the Museum of Buraidah, struck by an American bomb during the fighting.  Doug knew that Lindsey would have said a great many angry things over the destruction of a historic centre, but the Saudis had turned it into a strongpoint and it had been destroyed from high overhead.  A few dozen men were picking through the wreckage, trying to recover what they could, while others stood on the sidelines shouting advice.  Doug felt a little sympathy for them, but not much.  If they hadn't wanted the building destroyed, they shouldn't have turned it into a target.  He thought the same as they glided past a set of destroyed mosques and a building of indeterminate purpose.  They had chosen to use them as strongpoints and they had no right to complain when the strongpoints had been destroyed.

His radio buzzed.  “Sergeant, this is Piper,” a voice said.  Piper was the callsign for the UAV operators back in Kuwait, controlling a drone hovering high over the city.  “We have multiple groups of young men making their way towards your position.”

“Understood, Piper,” Doug said.  He switched the radio to the general channel.  “We have trouble up ahead, troops; get ready to repel attack.”

He leaned back as the Humvees headed towards open ground, listening to the chatter from Piper as the insurgents altered their own course to intercept.  They hadn't planned their ambush very well, the calculating part of his mind noted, unless it was a cunning double-bluff.  They might have known – or guessed – about Piper and timed their movements to force the Americans into a killing ground.  He pushed that thought aside as the Humvee burst into an open area and headed towards the far end.  A moment later, gunshots started to rattle out from firing positions ahead of them.