Carnifex (41 page)

"I fear that few of them will, Mustafa. The enemy has blocked all the major passes and most, I think, of the minor ones."

"Then we are helpless."

Cara sighed, helplessly. Ricardo had his eyes on the television screen, a bottle of rum in one hand, a glass of some local cola in the other. Nothing she'd been able to do had pulled his attention from either rum or television since the Legion had commenced operations in Pashtia. Sometimes, she thought she saw him rub at his eyes. Tears? She didn't know and really didn't want to find out.

God, what have I done to him?
she wondered.
He doesn't eat. He isn't studying. He won't pay any attention to me or the children. I thought he would learn to be happy . . . happier, here with us. Why aren't we
enough
for him?

Was I just selfish, demanding he get out of the Legion? I don't know. I do know that if he'd stayed in he'd probably be over there now and it would be me watching the television for any sign of him and worrying myself sick. So what did I do? I substituted his misery for mine. Maybe that wasn't fair.

But he's
my
man, not the Legion's. I own him. My rights are superior to theirs.

Again she sighed.
But are they superior to
his?

The town ahead wasn't much, perhaps two hundred houses, a mosque and a few stores. Even so, it promised resupply and some refuge from the eyes in the sky.

The plane, blotted out by the sun, wasn't even a dot to Noorzad when it began its dive. His first warning was when a horse screamed—always more horrible than the scream of a man—as large-caliber bullets pierced its torso, flinging it in blood to the ground.

The column, which had been trudging wearily to the mountains to the north, and safety, suddenly erupted in bedlam. Men shouted; animals squealed. Then came the sound of the enemy's machine guns—a
brrrrp
of explosions so close together they sounded like cloth ripping—and the whine of its engines as it pulled up and around for another pass.

Soon, much sooner than could be accounted for by a single plane, a salvo of rockets erupted overhead in the glare of the sun. Flechettes, they had to have been, as pockets of men, horses, mules and donkey's were scythed down along the line of march. Some of the horses were felled with as many as a dozen of the finned nails entering their bodies and then tumbling to slice out inch-wide routes through their flesh. Men, small targets as they were, might take half as many. To the targets it made little difference.

Many of the riflemen and machine gunners returned fire as Noorzad had trained them to. Unfortunately, he had trained them to engage helicopters and relatively high performance jets. These new infidel planes made a hash of their training as they fired and turned without ever entering the curtain of fire thrown up by those on the ground.

Should I have stayed and fought where I was?
Noorzad wondered amidst the confusion. He shook his head.
No, that would have just gotten my entire group isolated, surrounded, and destroyed. It is more important to preserve a seed, a kernel, from which more mujahadin can grow.

Noorzad lifted his eyes heavenward and saw both of the enemy aircraft twisting in the sky. He thought, but could not be sure, that they had their canopies pointing downward. The aircraft separated, one moving to the north of Noorzad's band the other to the east. He thought the one that flew to the north was further out than the eastern one.

This, too, was different from what he was used to. Normally he'd have expected the aircraft to make a pass or two, drop some bombs, fire some rockets, and then move on. To have the infernal machines . . . linger . . . well, that was disturbing.

As he'd thought, the eastern plane was closer. It came in, low and menacing. It fired its machine guns in bursts, veering slightly southward with each ripped cloth roar.

"Cut the lead! Cut the lead!" Noorzad tried to shout over the din. No matter; his men, such as were firing, were too intent on their hoped-for target, or seeking cover from its guns, to listen.

In the confusion, Noorzad lost track for a moment of the plane that had gone to the north. Suddenly remembering, he turned his eyes in that direction and saw that that enemy bird, too, was diving in. He saw a glint of dull light; from the undercarriage, so he thought.

The thought brought absolute terror. Noorzad had seen silvery canisters under aircraft before.

"Naaapppaaalllmmm!"

Some of his followers heard his shout, saw the aircraft bearing in, and followed Noorzad in running out of its line of flight. Even the heavy bullets of the other plane held small terror in comparison to being burned alive. Still, many did not hear or, if hearing, did not understand. These kept their positions and either hid or fired as the mood and their degree of manhood took them.

Noorzad looked behind himself as he ran. He'd guessed right, he saw, and took no satisfaction in it. From underneath the second aircraft, the one from the north, two cylinders tumbled end over end until reaching the ground. There they broke apart, spilling their incendiary contents along two parallel straight lines with almost no dispersion. The burning stuff moved like a mini-tsunami, passing around the boulders and covering such of his men who'd remained behind in fire. Their common howl of utter agony sounded even over the roar of flame, engine and machine gun.

We've got to split up
, Noorzad thought, breathlessly.
Together we're simply too inviting a target.

Noorzad took a hiding position between two boulders and pulled out his map. Yes, there were enough small towns like Sanda that he could hope to hide the bulk of his force while he escaped with the small, hard core that had been with him for years.

Press conferences with the Legion were rare, very rare.

Still not rare enough to suit me,
thought Carrera.
Even so, I suppose I owe it to the legionaries left behind, and the families of those who are here, to let them know what's happening.

The limited number of pressies, deliberately limited, actually, was clustered around Carrera in a town square in front of a mosque that was little more than rubble.

The whole town was considerably the worse for wear, Carrera saw. With the awful task of blocking escapes, driving the enemy from a roughly triangular area two hundred miles wide and one hundred and fifty deep, and searching out the thousands of little towns and villages, and likely cave complexes, his forty-eight maniples of infantry, fifteen of Cazadors, and dozen of mechanized troops were, to say the least, stretched.

Still, the town had blocked the only possible supply route from Thermopolis and so the problem of the town had had to be solved. He'd solved it by flattening the town in substantial part. Not for him the risking of his own troops to limit collateral damage and loss of civilian life. He didn't have enough troops for that and the collateral damage meant almost nothing to him.

"They know we're coming," he'd said. "It's up to them to get out of
our
way, not up to us to tiptoe around them."

Not that he'd blasted the town indiscriminately, far from it. Rather, with his one hundred and eight long-range, Volgan-designed and built 152mm howitzers, his thirty-six
Tsunami
multiple rocket-launchers, hundreds of sorties by Turbo-Finches and Nabakovs in the bomber role, and, over the last twenty-four hours, his thirty-six heavy mortars, he'd pounded every known and likely enemy hiding position with considerable precision, aided by real time reconnaissance from both his own air assets and the FSC's.

Since the enemy insisted on trying to hide among civilians, however, his precision had meant more civilian casualties rather than fewer.

"Tough shit," he said to a reporter who asked about civilian casualties. "If they want to save civilians, let them not hide behind the women's skirts. I'm certainly not going to pander to their deliberate violations of the laws of war."

One might have thought that the global press would have intervened and interfered. They said not a word. They'd learned, over the years, the Legion had no compunction about killing members of the media they considered to be in the enemy camp. There was not, in fact, a member of the FSC's or Tauran Union's press within thirty miles of Mazari Omar. And of the members of, say, the Islamic world's press, particularly
al Iskandaria
 . . . 

"That's them over there, gentlemen," Carrera told the remaining assembled members of the Fourth Estate, all carefully vetted members of the Balboan and other Northern Colombian media. "Yes, those dozen swinging from the lampposts. We caught them with enemy propaganda in their video recorders. They were then duly turned over to our Pashtian allies who tried them and hanged them as enemy combatants found not wearing uniforms. The chief mullah for my Pashtun, Mullah Hassim, approved the sentences completely."

Not all the buildings of Mazari Omar had been damaged. Most were, in fact, still standing and even in reasonable repair. Of these, many were requisitioned by the Legion. In the case of public buildings there would be no recompense, though the few owners of private real estate that the Legion needed were compensated with cash on the spot.

In one such, an apartment building of three floors that had the distinct advantage of having a very open ground floor, the MI, or military intelligence, maniple had set up shop.

Larry Triste was not in command of the MI maniple; that was far too low a posting for the Intelligence Officer for the entire deployed corps. Still, the MI maniple worked for him; its commander, a Tribune III, took his orders from him. Sometimes, that same tribune muttered, "I'm not in command. I'm just the XO for Legate Triste."

That wasn't quite fair but it was at least understandable. And Triste really did try to keep his hands off the day to day running of the maniple. Still, when he asked . . . 

"Goddammit, where did that fucking guerilla battalion
go
that the air engaged by Sanda yesterday
?
"

 . . . people hopped to find the answer.

"Sir," answered a junior warrant, "If you'll look over here"—the warrant pointed at a map hanging on one wall—"we've tracked that battalion for the last several days. Based on their normal daily progress, and accounting for slowing down as the hills begin their ascent to the mountains, they're somewhere between Sanda and this pass." The warrant's pointer touched lightly on a spot where the track ran through a ridge.

"They're not there, however, or at least not in the strength we've been tracking."

"Yeah, so? Where are they? What strength are they in?"

The pointer touched lightly on seventeen towns spaced about three miles apart within an oval on the map.

"We think they've split up. We think that one group, maybe the core of the battalion, took all or at least most of the horses and ran for it. That would explain why we can't find them where they ought to be. The others are likely in these towns."

Triste sat silently for a minute, gazing at the map and thinking on it. Finally, he nodded his head, once, decisively.

"I think you're right. Get me the ops shop."

They'd worked out the technique over the long campaign in Sumer. It was helicopter intensive, infantry intensive, and military intelligence, military police, civil affairs, and PSYOP intensive. Thus, the Legion could not do it everywhere simultaneously.

The first the townspeople of the targeted area knew of it, it was announced by the drone of well over one hundred helicopters bringing in two heavily reinforced cohorts of infantry supported by dozens of highly visible attack aircraft flying escort. The townsfolk's initial instincts were to fight. Initial instinctive urges to fight often wither when faced by overwhelming force.

The helicopters landed in a swarm, like locusts,
everywhere
. The troops they carried disgorged with practiced, professional speed and ease, and then raced to surround every town in the target area, plus another eight outside of where they expected the enemy to be. Loudspeaker teams from a psychological operations maniple accompanied the infantry. These advised the townsfolk not to resist, but to stay inside until they were ordered out. A single battery of 160mm mortars, set up just outside the target area, began to register fire at points outside the towns to reinforce what the PSYOP people said.

When fire came from one town, the heavy mortars, the attack aircraft overhead, and a single maniple of infantry reinforced with fourteen Ocelot light armored vehicles attacked brutally, destroying the town along with most of its men. The PSYOP teams broadcast the result of that resistance and the attack, as a warning to others. Indeed, only women and children were spared, and that only where practical.

Sanda was picked as the first town to be cleared as being the most likely to contain terrorists. The townsfolk were ordered to line up and come forward in single file to a point west of the town. They were met by troops from the MI using dogs specially trained to smell women. When people wearing women's clothing that did not smell quite right passed the dogs, the canines alerted.

Three of Noorzad's band were caught that way and carted off for
rigorous
questioning.

Other dogs sniffed for explosive residue and weapons oil. Several more terrorists were captured. Another was shot down on the spot for being a potential suicide bomb. The Legion preferred to use shotguns for this purpose as they had much better immediate knockdown and endangered bystanders less. People behind the victim suffered little beyond being splattered with blood and bits of flesh.

From the initial dog-sniffing station the townsfolk were sent through a medical station which not only administered inoculations but also drew blood for DNA samples. There, too, everyone was subjected to facial recognition imaging which went directly to military intelligence. The DNA results from the medical screening would arrive at the MI headquarters sometime in the next 24 hours.