A Desert Called Peace (60 page)

"We had hoped that by becoming a major food grower we could break our dependence on western imports. For a while, even, we were the fourth largest exporter of wheat in the world. We export none of that now, and again have to import wheat.

"And the Salafi are growing out of hand. We had thought the Americans would have curtailed their influence once they defeated al Qaeda. It didn't last.

"We have to advance—yes, like the West—and we cannot when every forward step we take is blocked by the Salafi."

The king's hand reached up to stroke his beard. "So you think if we give up the stone, this one of sixteen hundred and fourteen, then some sizable number of the Salafi will simply pack up and leave? Remember the disaster on the first colonization ship."

Bandar nodded. "They were mixed. We shall hire, perhaps even build or, more likely, have built, a ship or ships to take the Salafi away. Will they go? Yes, and quite possibly a large number of them. And if we can get rid of a sizable number initially, we can change this country enough to make it uncomfortable for the rest so that
they
leave too. Oh, Brother, I am
telling
you; this Donya al Jedidah is the answer to our prayers."

The king chewed on his lower lip and then reached up one hand to stroke his beard, contemplatively. "You know, there's another potential advantage here, Brother. What if we used our influence to set aside an area for the Zionists on the New World. Surely some would go; they've got to be as tired of the constant fighting as the Palestinians are, if not more so. They've got to be tired of the taxes, the constant military duty. If we can entice away some numbers of Jews, the burdens on those who remain will grow greater still. That might well make even more leave. And each who leaves makes it more likely, just as with our own fanatics, that more will leave. Get enough to go and the Zionist entity falls."

"You're dumping our problems here on the people we send out," Bandar objected.

The king shrugged eloquently. "So?"

Bandar considered. He rocked his head back and forth for a few moments. Finally, he shrugged to match his brother. "Indeed. 'So?'"

Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war; it allows of the capturing of every armed enemy, and every enemy of importance to the hostile government, or of peculiar danger to the captor; it allows of all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy; of the appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the Army, and of such deception as does not involve the breaking of good faith either positively pledged, regarding agreements entered into during the war, or supposed by the modern law of war to exist. Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.

—The Lieber Code, Section 15

The sand tore at
Amid
Adnan Sada's face. He didn't mind, not in the slightest.

Keeps their damned planes and attack helicopters away, at least, and so, Allah, for this I thank You.

Sada, an
Amid,
or brigadier general, in the Army of the Republic of Sumer, wore desert battle dress with insignia of his unit, rank and branch sewn on. A khaki colored cloth was tied over his mouth and nostrils; breathing was nearly impossible otherwise.

But, Allah,
Sada amended,
I would
really
have appreciated it if you had brought the wind and the dust earlier so I could have brought in enough to feed my men.

"And that's the problem,
Amid,
" Sada's supply officer had said. "I have the ammunition, building materials, fuel and all that. But food? I have ten days' supply, or maybe fifteen on short rations. No more."

The supply officer, Major—or
Raiid—
Faush, was one of the good ones, Sada thought.
Another man might have sold the lot, or stored it to sell to the FSC when their forces arrived. Faush I can trust. Faush I can count on. And he isn't even a clan member. How often does that happen?

In fact, in Sada's brigade it happened more often than not. He had his ways.

Sada's cell phone rang, sounding loudly even over the roar of the howling wind. He answered it, saw that it was a text message, and began to laugh.

"General?" questioned Faush.

Instead of answering, Sada just passed the phone over. Faush read.

"How
did
they get our personal cell phone numbers?" he asked, after reading. "I mean, there ought to be
something
private in life;
something
sacred."

The text message on the phone was an invitation to surrender from the FSC's Office of Strategic Intelligence.

"I don't know, Faush," Sada answered, still laughing. "Hell, it will probably work for nine out of ten of our top commanders."

"No matter,
Amid
; it won't work here." Faush sounded more confident than perhaps he felt. Not that Sada would surrender easily.
That
was never going to happen, Faush was certain. Why, in the Sumer-Farsia war of sixteen years before Sada, then a captain commanding the rump of a cut-off and undersupplied infantry battalion against uncountable and fanatical Farsian human wave assaults, had refused to surrender for weeks. He'd held the Farsians off, too, until relief got to him. There was not a man who survived that ordeal but didn't worship the ground the
amid
walked on, at least when they thought Allah might not be looking. Faush was one of those survivors, as were most of the key leaders of Sada's current command.

Achmed Qabaash, Sada's operations officer, observed, enthusiastically, "We'd better fight like hell. Everyone says the enemy coming from the south doesn't take prisoners." Qabaash liked a good fight. He was odd that way.

"I wonder if that's true," Sada said. "I know they've make no secret of not taking prisoners if the men concerned are with a unit that violated the western laws of war. But there was a division's worth of men in towns to the south of us. I doubt they killed them all."

Dusty, tired, hungry and miserable Sumeri POWs trekked under armed guard southward, directly into the wind.

Soult, his face like his chief's handkerchiefed against the biting wind and sand, looked at the prisoners with a degree of contempt. He couldn't really understand surrendering, even on the promise of good treatment. Better to die like a soldier.

"Are they all cowards, Boss?" he asked Carrera. "We offer to take prisoners and they surrender. We kill everything moving and they still
try
to surrender. I just don't understand it. Seems chicken to me."

Carrera, sitting on the canvas seat next to Soult took a moment before answering, simply, "They're no more cowardly as a people than anyone else. Cowards don't fly airships into buildings. Cowards don't load themselves with explosives and try to get close enough to do us some harm before detonating themselves. No, Jamey, they're not cowards. But they have some problems. It's the problems that account for most of the violations of the laws of war they engage in."

Seeing from his eyes, the only uncovered part of his face, that Soult didn't really understand, Carrera continued. "The sociologists call them "amoral familists." What that means is that they are raised in such a way that they cannot really conceive of legitimate loyalty to someone who isn't a blood relation. For that matter, when it is a question of loyalty to two blood relations the one with the closer relationship is the one who gets the loyalty. Religion counts to them, too, and a lot, but that makes very different demands on them. Nation? Means nothing to most . . . or less than nothing, often enough. The family is where their important loyalties lie, the family is what will protect them from a hostile world, the family is their law and their guide."

"Yeah . . . but so?" Soult plainly didn't understand.

"It means they're completely alone, Jamey, completely alone in the most terrifying place man can exist, the modern battlefield. They can't trust their squad mates, they can't trust their officers, unless those are also blood relations. For any given soldier in a Sumeri—or Yithrabi, Jahari or Misrani—unit under serious duress the only questions are, 'Can I run or surrender before the rest do? Am I going to be stuck here, alone, to face the enemy while the rest run?' It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, true. But the way a prophecy becomes self-fulfilling is by being destined to be fulfilled." Carrera sounded sad.

"You actually like them, don't you, Boss?"

"Jamey . . ." Carrera hesitated, "I used to like them a lot. It's . . . harder now.

"Sometimes they can break out of that self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way," Carrera added, perhaps only to change the direction in which the conversation had turned. "Some of their tribally based units aren't bad, though they've got problems when the tribal chain of command and the military one don't mesh. They've also got problems in that the tribe, while it might fight well, has a very finite tolerance for casualties.

"The other way, and it has happened occasionally, is when some outsider is in command who refuses to have any truck with tribes. If he can assemble a group that has no tribal majority, preferably if he can assemble one where each member has no tribal link with any other, sometimes he can make a good unit. Sometimes. It's harder than hell to do."

Sada walked from building to building, inspecting the positions his men were preparing as they made ready to defend the town. It was a relief to go inside, if only to escape from the dust. Some of his boys were digging up the streets to excavate trenches to connect the buildings. That would, Sada was sure, come in handy.

The lieutenant in charge of the platoon was new. Sada searched his memory.
Lieutenant Rashad is from the Bani Malik tribe. His platoon sergeant is one of my old boys, from the Farsian War, an al Hameed. Squad leaders are . . . 

"Sergeant Major?" Sada questioned.

"Sir," began the sergeant major, "no two members of the same tribe in this platoon." Sada's brigade sergeant major, and McNamara would have approved, had grown very good at reading his boss' mind over the preceding decades.

The units of Sada's brigade were organized in one of two ways. About a third of them were strictly set up along tribal lines, the only caveat to that structure being that the leadership of the unit and the leadership of the tribe
within
the unit had to match. The
amid
had run off more than one sergeant, senior in the tribe's hierarchy, who had thought to ignore his captain, who was junior.

The other two thirds, roughly, Sada and his right-hand man, the sergeant major, went out of their way to ensure had
no
tribal identity. It seemed to Sada that one of the problems—and he understood them even better than Carrera did—was that extra-tribal loyalty couldn't
grow
wherever there was a focus for tribal loyalty, but could, potentially, where there was none. The toughest part had been the officers, whom one could ordinarily have expected to loot their units if the men in those units had no blood ties.

Give the dictator this much,
thought Sada.
He kept his own tribe out of my brigade, excepting only a couple of spies, and didn't mind how many men from other tribes I had shot for corruption.

Sada had shot a few of them personally. He still smiled sometimes at the memory of Faush's predecessor, caught with his hand in the till. Sada had simply drawn his pistol and shot the man at point-blank range. That was how Faush had inherited the job.

Pity what the blood did to the books though,
Sada thought regretfully.

The lieutenant of the platoon misinterpreted the look on his
amid's
face. "Sir, the men are working as hard as they can . . ."

"Show me your hands," Sada ordered.

Still uncomprehending, the lieutenant held up clean hands with unbroken nails.

Sada smiled indulgently. He leaned over to whisper in the young officer's ear. "You're new, my son. So I'll forgive you . . . this once. But officers in my brigade
work.
Officers in my brigade
lead
.
You
will work if you want to continue to
lead
. Or would you prefer to go to the penal platoon, minus your rank, now?"

The sun was setting on a desolate scene, made all the more so by the dust that covered everything in swirling, choking eddies. Red leaflets, prepared by the Psychological Operations Century and dropped by Cricket recon plane ahead of the legion as it advanced, also blew in the breeze. The leaflets proclaimed the list of Sumeri violations of the laws of war, to date, and the legion's bloody-handed response to them.

The press was . . . stymied. When no one responded to their charges, except to admit them and insist the reprisals were lawful, they found they had no recourse. There was no blood in the water, no struggling body filled with fear of the righteous wrath of the media. The sharks couldn't go into a feeding frenzy.

On the other hand,
admitted Carrera to himself, as he exited his vehicle,
while the press is defanged, if the Sumeris had a half-functioning chain of command at army level and a couple of battalions of working armor, I'd be fucked.

Logistically, the legion was a mess. Carrera had one cohort detached from the line to guard prisoners. There were so many of these that his one century of military police camp guards, even supplemented by the field police century, the walking wounded and as many service troops as could be spared, simply
couldn't
guard them all. In point of fact it was more important that he was feeding his prisoners than that he was guarding them. For food, they'd stick around. Guards? Eh? They could be ducked in a thick enough sandstorm.