A Desert Called Peace (50 page)

Oil brought unprecedented wealth. Money received from it went into the creation of welfare states, impressively armed if indifferently effective military and naval forces, and provided obscenely lavish lifestyles for the ruling clans. No small amount, too, went to the spread of Salafism.

Among the Misrani at the edge of Southern Uhuru, to Kashmir, to Sukarno, madrassas sprang up like mushrooms. Providing free room and board, as well as a free—if highly constrained—education, the madrassas were highly popular among the disenfranchised lower classes of the Moslem portions of Terra Nova.

And
that
was the problem.
Most
of the population of Moslem states on Terra Nova were disenfranchised and frighteningly poor. Moreover, while the first two hundred and fifty years of settlement had seen them prosper approximately as well as colonization efforts by non-Moslems, after approximately the middle of the third Terra Novan century this was no longer true. Increasingly, they had fallen behind. Increasingly they were seen to be militarily inept. Increasingly, the pride of a very proud set of people was pricked. Increasingly, they heard the message of the Salafis to return to the older, purer ways . . . to fight back with fire and sword.

Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket"—which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and—watch that basket!"

—Mark Twain

The land was compartmentalized by east-west running ridges that arose, one after another, and dominated the valleys between. A highway, a mix of gravel, dirt, potholes, and—in rare spots—asphalt, wound through the valleys and narrow gaps that appeared occasionally between sections of ridge. The highway eventually led to Ninewa and, beyond that, Babel.

Joint patrols, Yezidi and Sumeri, walked the demarcation line between the Federated States-guaranteed Yezidi Safe Zone and that portion of the Republic of Sumer still under Sumeri control. This demarcation line, in the vicinity of the town of Mangesh, was a river. The patrols chatted amiably enough across the river despite the certainty on the part of all concerned that the area would see fighting in no more than a Terra Novan month.

In a marginally heated four wheel drive vehicle followed by a truck holding a squad of Cazadors with an engineer team to operate a mine detector, Parilla and Carrera rolled north.

"So there really is a Multichucha Ridge," Parilla observed with wonder in his voice.

"Oh, yes," Carrera, sitting in the back, agreed. There, stretching out east to west before them were five sets of enormous, naturally occurring, grass, bush, sand, rock and gravel simulacra of female genitalia.

"The one farthest east doesn't look all that realistic," Parilla continued. "But the two to the west are frighteningly real."

"Don't know about you two, sirs, but it sure makes me homesick," commented the driver.

There was a Chaldean, a native of Mangesh, in the back of the four wheel drive, next to Carrera. Fahad had grown up in the shadow of the ridge. His people had their own phrase for the terrain feature but that, too, translated as "Multi-pussy Ridge."

"Fahad," Carrera questioned in English, "are you absolutely
certain
you know a way to the top of that ridge where we can observe the Sumeri positions and that getting to which won't run us into a minefield?"

The Chaldean considered. He spoke Arabic, English, and Yezidi, along with his native tongue. It was in English that he answered. Why not? He had done his first term of military service in the Sumeri Army teaching English at the Sumeri War College outside of Babel.

"Yes," Fahad said. "No problem. The snow makes it tougher but the path I know is broad. We should be fine."

Carrera translated for Parilla's benefit but to the latter's considerable doubt and plain discomfiture.

"I don't even like the
idea
of land mines," Parilla muttered.

"No one does," Carrera agreed. "Not until you have a horde of screaming motherfuckers coming to kill you and all that stands between their bayonets and you is a belt of land mines."

At Fahad's point of a finger the vehicles pulled over to allow the leaders, plus the Cazadors and the engineers, to dismount. Fahad led the way upward, stopping occasionally to check his memory of the path against what he believed to be certain terrain features somewhat hidden under snow. He must have guessed right; there were no loud explosions on the way up.

Just below the summit Parilla and Carrera stopped to allow the Cazadors to scout forward. At the squad leader's signal that all was clear they, too, crouched low and advanced. A dozen meters or so before the actual summit of the ridge, they went to their bellies and crawled through the hard-packed, icy snow to the top.

The sun was setting to the west. There would be no telltale flashes from the glass of the binoculars they used to scout out the opposite ridge, Hill 1647, which was to be the legion's initial objective.

"Fuck," Carrera said.

"Chingada," Parilla agreed.

From where they lay the pair saw the highway as it ran between two fortresses. Each of the fortresses was just under a kilometer across and, according to photo recon, about two thirds that deep. They were entrenched, bunkered and wired in. Moreover, according to the Yezidi, there were deep minefields in between the belts of wire. To add to the problem, a twenty-meter-wide river, low and slow moving but very cold, crossed the valley near to the base of the Sumeri held ridgelines.

"Too steep to get armor up," Parilla observed. "Even if they could get across the river."

"Maybe the lighter vehicles could make it. Maybe." Carrera countered. "If they could follow the most advantageous paths. If they could go slow. If they were not being shot at. If the best paths were clear of mines which, by all reports, they most definitely are not."

"An infantry attack?" Parilla queried. "Maybe at night."

Carrera didn't answer immediately. Looking back through his binoculars again at the thick rows of barbed wire, Carrera saw them as they might be if he ordered an assault to clear the hill, thick with the bodies, and parts of bodies, of his troops. Half a dozen possible plans flashed through his head. Each was quickly discarded before he settled on something that might be workable if short of brilliant.

"They'll get butchered by machine guns and the artillery that—I have no doubt—is on call to support the defense. And attacking at night, whatever the advantages, is confusing as hell. Too confusing to subject troops to it for their first action."

"Then how?" the
Dux
asked.

"What we have is a training issue," Carrera responded, cryptically. "That; an engineering problem and a logistics problem. Now, where are we going to get a shitpot of concrete mix and another six hundred tons of artillery and mortar ammunition on short notice?" he mused.

All the drive back to Mangesh Base Carrera pondered, mused, considered and scribbled in a notebook.

They were called, after the German,
Stollen
, and they were the least offensive-seeming things imaginable. Long, narrow, and deep— rather like the Sachsen Christmas cake—the
Stollen
were nothing but shelters, passive, harmless, inoffensive shelters. Who can object, after all, to a Sachsen Christmas cake?

The river at the base of Hill 1647 marked the demarcation line. Accordingly, the
Stollen
went up two to three hundred meters south of the river, within—if barely—the Yezidi Safe Zone.

"What are they for?" all three leaders of the local Yezidi political, which were also tribal, parties asked. Since Carrera was certain that at least one of the Yezidis reported directly to Babel, he told the truth. Sort of.

"The Sumeris are likely to pound the shit out of us once the FSC begins the war. There is no place we can do our job, which is to protect you, where we will not also be in artillery range. The mountains are too rocky to dig into very well in the time we have. So I am building shelters for my men down in the valley where we can continue to protect you despite the shelling I anticipate."

This was, of course, not the complete truth. Still, reasonably satisfied at the answer, the Yezidis offered their followers as a labor force. They did not do so, naturally, without extracting a contract from the legion for pay for the labor provided. The mere fact that someone was doing you a favor was not in itself a sufficient reason not to insist on being paid for helping them do you that favor.

"I
loathe
the Yezidis," Carrera said to his chief engineer, Sam Cheatham, and Fahad when he had called them together in the valley to explain what he wanted done.

"
You
loathe them?" Fahad had answered. "Let me tell you about the Yezidis—"

"No time, Fahad," Carrera said, holding one hand up, palm out, "and I've heard all about it before."

"I wish I could put you up about sixteen of the things." Cheatham sighed, referring to the
Stollen
. "But I just don't have the material or the skilled manpower. I've only got my seventy-odd engineers, plus whatever I can use from the line cohorts' engineer sections. But they, frankly, are sappers, not builders. And the Yezidi are not going to be worth much besides scut work."

"How many can you put up that will be strong enough to take a direct hit from an eight-inch gun?" Carrera asked. "And remember, we have to be able to shelter about twelve hundred men in them for a few days."

"In the time I have," Cheatham answered, "with the material I have and with the workers I have, I can put up four, each about thirty feet by one hundred, and with a thick enough overhead cover to take a couple of eight-inch hits. By the way, sir, what makes you think the Sumeris even
have
eight inch guns?"

"Nothing," Carrera shook his head in negation. "But they
might
have them."

"Okay," Cheatham said agreeably. "Four
Stollen
coming up. This weather is going to be a problem, you know. Concrete—at least the kind I have been able to scrounge locally—doesn't set worth a shit in this kind of cold. How about if I blast a shitload of rock out of the last ridge and use that to reinforce?"

"That's fine, Sam. Do it however you think best. But get me my Christmas cakes cooked."

"What if they try to shell my engineers while they're working?" Cheatham asked, not unreasonably.

"I don't think they will, Sam, mainly because they don't have much in their strategic inventory except some sympathy from whoever hates the FSC. They'll want the coalition to fire the first shot. Even so, until H Hour-3, or at least until you're done building, you've got priority of fires—direct control if you think you need it—over all the legion's artillery plus the 105mm battalion from the 731st
Airborne."

"Hmmm. Shells would arrive here before counterbattery could have any effect. So, if you don't mind, I'll start by digging some slit trenches for my people
before
we start work on the
Stollen
."

"That's fine," Carrera had answered. "Don't dawdle over it, though. And remember I also need some special shelters built for the artillery."

For Cheatham's slit trenches he used two entrenching machines that had been purchased from the Volgans. These were of the smaller variety, having an arm of sorts that they dragged behind them and which more or less horizontally spun a series of steel buckets to cut a neat trench about seventy-five centimeters wide and a meter and a half deep. The frozen state of the ground made this a slower than normal operation but within a day the entrenching machines had scraped out sixteen reasonably sized slit trenches.

The Sumeris had paid no mind at all, so far as Cheatham could see, to the operation of the entrenching machines.

While the trench cutters were in operation, gangs of Yezidi with picks and shovels began excavating the outlines of the
Stollen
to a depth of about a meter. The Sumeris paid no attention to them, either.

When the engineers began blasting off slabs of rock from the far slope of Multichucha Ridge, the Sumeris had manned their trenches and bunkers. Still, when no attack materialized, they went back to their normal routine of shivering, freezing and, if the Yezidi were to be believed, buggering each other. In this belief Fahad and the Chaldeans seemed to concur.

They were still, so far as Cheatham could tell, buggering each other when the frameworks for the Stollen began to go up.

Perhaps they had run out of lubrication—that, or they'd discovered that weapons oil was a poor substitute—when the layer of concrete was poured. They seemed fascinated by that, sitting atop the lips of their trenches, chatting amiably among each other, and generally having a good time watching the legion and the Yezidis work in the cold.

Supplies of a less toxic lubricant must have come through, though, because they disappeared again when the Yezidi gangs began piling dirt atop the concrete. Still, so Cheatham and the Yezidis surmised, those supplies must have been limited. They were back again to watch as the dirt was covered with large chunks and slabs of rock.

Sam Cheatham didn't bother to camouflage the
Stollen
. Anybody who thought that a six to seven meter high loaf of rock, dirt and concrete sticking up out of a flat plain in plain view of the enemy was going to be hidden by a few odd bits of grass was either smoking something or, as was perhaps the case, too busy being buggered to worry about. Besides, snow would be along any day now and it would do a better job of camouflage than anything that could be done artificially.

Mukkaddam
, or Lieutenant Colonel, Ali al Tikriti had a problem. No, that wasn't quite right. What he had was approximately seven hundred and one problems. The seven hundred, give or take a few, were his men, whom he despised as a lot of illiterate, lazy, good for nothing peasants. The one, and that was the worst of the lot, was the dictator—Saleh, his fourth cousin, twice removed—sitting in what was likely to prove a very temporary safety in one of his palaces near Babel.