A Desert Called Peace (94 page)

At that time another series of explosions rocked the town. Even at this distance, several kilometers, Lindemann and Carrera were rocked by the blasts.

"What was that?" she asked.

"We're destroying the food stocks in the town," he answered, calmly. "This is a
siege
, Ms. Lindemann, not a game. This is war, not a boxing match. Now, you can take your trucks back, or you can sit here, or you can do whatever you like . . . 
except
resupply that city. That you will not be permitted to do."

"What about when the people try to escape? You know they will."

"Then, Ms. Lindemann, we will do what the law of war permits. Besides, before they get out they'll have to clear mines. They're not really equipped for that. We won't let them, anyway."

"You
are
going to let them out at some point, aren't you, Patricio?" Jimenez asked.

"'Course I am, Xavier. I can't tell you when, exactly. I'll let the Kosmos beg, and chide and nag for ten days or maybe a couple of weeks. Then, I'll exact some concessions from them. I'm still thinking about what concessions I'll want. Maybe we'll make them grovel and thank us for abiding so completely by the law of war. Maybe we'll just make them feed us first. Maybe both and maybe more.

"After that, we'll drop some leaflets and let the pregnant women and the sick out. Then the Kosmos can care for them a few miles downstream."

The leaflets fell from the sky—specifically, they were dropped by Crickets—before sunrise. On one side they showed pictures and diagrams of who would be allowed out and where. The pictures showed one woman with a large belly, a man on a stretcher, and a very small child. The diagram was simply the place where Highway 1 met the encircling berms and minefields. More complex instructions were written on the back. Most of Pumbadeta's adult residents, male and even female, could read.

Fadeel was mixed about the prospect. Food was already scarce; this would reduce the number of mouths he had to feed. On the other hand, he was counting on the presence of large numbers of noncombatants, when the assault finally came, to sully the reputation of the coalition. Then he remembered:

This part of the coalition doesn't care a goat's ass for their reputation with the humanitarians. They'll kill without compunction. Better, then, to let go whoever will be allowed out, to stretch out the food that remains.

Three hundred thousand people, give or take, had been trapped when the siege fell on the city like a thunderclap. Of those, perhaps five or six thousand were truly sick. An additional ten or eleven thousand women may have been pregnant or nursing. And there were many small children.

Nothing like that number came out. Nursing women would be allowed to leave, but what if they had children over the age of six, which was Carrera's stated cut off? Would they leave those behind? For the most part, they would not. What about women with children who would be allowed out as well as children who would not be? They tended to stay behind as well. And the sick? If they were truly ill, they needed to be carried. Stretcher bearers from the legion were standing by to take their litters. Few men inside the town were willing to bear them to the demarcation berm.

In all, perhaps five thousand, or a few more, of the citizens of the town actually left. Then the wall closed down again.

As that wall closed, Fernandez and his people, supplemented by Sada's, descended on the refugees, pumping them, without violence, for any information they might have on the defenses and the defenders. Most knew little. A few were better informed.

"Why so few sick?" Lindemann asked. When Carrera explained, she volunteered, on behalf of herself and her workers, to go in and carry the deathly ill out.

"No . . . you would just be held and become hostages," he answered, feeling a measure of grudging admiration. "They get out on their own, or with the help of those inside, or they stay there. I'm still willing to airdrop medicine, remember."

"What good is medicine without doctors to administer it?" she asked.

"Not my concern. But if you can talk Mustafa into letting Doctor Nur al-Deen—he's the enemy's overall number two, you know?— jump in by parachute, I'll be glad to let him do so. Course, I'll hang the bastard right after we take the town."

The air defense maniple that loosely ringed the city was useful only for low flying aircraft. For any that flew higher Carrera had Turbo- Finches armed with machine gun pods. These, with a top speed of only about two hundred and fifty miles per hour, were extremely poor interdiction aircraft.

On the other hand, the Castilla-built Hacienda-121 was a very good light cargo aircraft, but its top speed was only two hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. Thus, when the pilot of the circling Turbo- Finch saw the Hacienda kicking bundles out the door, he had little trouble closing the distance and investigating. The Hacienda was decorated with a Red Crescent, sign of the Islamic version of the Red Cross. The serial numbers on the side of the Hacienda indicated Yithrabi registration.

Since he was weapons free, meaning he could engage any aircraft that fit his rules of engagement, and since he was expressly instructed not to permit any airdrops or aerial deliveries into the town without prior authorization, he armed his gun pods. If he worried even in the slightest about his commander's reaction to his shooting down a civilian aircraft he had only to remember that this was the third anniversary of a very important date to that commander.

It was unlikely that Carrera would mind,
today
, if he dropped a nuke.

Before shooting, though, the Finch pilot tried to warn the Hacienda off with a burst that flew parallel to the cargo plane. The plane shuddered, as if the pilot were surprised, but quickly got back on course. It was as if the Hacienda pilot simply couldn't believe that anyone would violate the rules the Kosmos had set up to protect just such activities. At that point, the Finch pilot shifted slightly to line his guns up, and opened fire with a short burst of several hundred rounds. Perhaps a third of these impacted the Hacienda, which heeled over to one side and began a rapid smoking descent to the ground.

And that was the last attempt at aerial resupply of the town by any Kosmo organization.

"Don't you have any sense of humanity?" Lindemann asked, furious and in tears.

Carrera thought about that for a few seconds before answering, "As you would define it? Perhaps not. Am I supposed to? If so, why?"

Fadeel was shocked,
shocked
at seeing the Hacienda go down in flames. He'd never believed any of his enemies would have the sheer . . . the sheer . . . 

They're as ruthless as I am. And much better armed. I'd better figure a way out of here for myself and my key subordinates or I'm screwed.

The sun had set several hours prior, leaving three spark-bright moons to shine onto the planet. They would set about midnight. In those hours, Fadeel had massed just over three hundred of his mujahadin and a thousand unarmed civilians in buildings on the north side of town, at a place where the ground was a bit rougher and where a man, once free of the encirclement, might have a chance to escape. He told his followers that this was a raid with the purpose of getting into the besiegers' rear area and ruining their supply arrangements. Liberally doped with hashish as many of those followers were, there had been no questions.

Ordinarily, Fadeel would have waited until perhaps three in the morning to launch his raid. That would be the time when the enemy would be at his lowest level of alert. Unfortunately, that would also not give him enough darkness before sunrise to effect his escape. The attack would be at midnight.

The legion had purchased two NA-23s for the express purpose of converting them to aerial gunships. Eventually, there would be four in a deployed legion, twenty total for the entire force, but for now, two would have to do. These were just enough, with maintenance schedules, to keep one on station throughout the night, most nights. Instead of "NA," these birds bore the designation "ANA"; "A" for Attack.

Out the left-hand side of each of the planes stuck the muzzles of five tri-barrel fifty caliber machine guns. These were chain guns, driven by electric motors to very high rates of fire, eighteen hundred rounds per minute, per gun. Between the five of them, the planes could spit out nine thousand rounds in just sixty seconds. The guns were carefully aligned so that number three, in the center of the left- hand side, fired to the center of the beaten zone, number one fired high, number five low, and two and four in between. The guns were somewhat loosely mounted as a certain amount of spread was deemed desirable.

Modifying the planes had not been particularly cheap. It had seemed worthwhile, therefore, to give each a fairly sophisticated suite of sensors, especially low light television and thermal imagers. The thermals alone were an appreciable percentage of the cost of the final system.

The price had been worth it. Alerted of the assembling enemy by the ever-roaming RPVs, the one ANA-23 on station was waiting when the mujahadin and the civilians emerged from their cover.

The gunner for the plane tapped his monitor to mark one edge of the enemy formation. He then tapped the perceived center of mass, and then the other end of the group. A computer registered the taps and calculated a flight path and attitude for optimal dispersion of fire. This was fed to the pilot's console automatically. The pilot aligned his plane on the calculated path, heeled over and began his firing run.

Fadeel's men crept forward, driving the civilians before them, toward the enemy-held berm that surrounded the town. He and his select followers waited in the covering buildings for a path to be breached.
Any minute now . . . 

"
Il hamdu l'illah!
" Fadeel exclaimed when the eye-searing lines began to burn down from the heavens onto his men. "I never saw—"

He stopped speaking when the near horizon lit up with what appeared to be a moving wall of flame.

Not only had the RPV alerted the ANA-23, it had also alerted base, which had sent out two sorties of Turbo-Finches carrying incendiaries, plus rocket and machine gun pods. The Finches followed hard on the heels of gunship's tracers with the leftmost bird in the lead and the rightmost following in echelon.

The Finches opened up with rockets first. These sped downrange until their time fuses exploded them about twelve hundred meters from the insurgents. Each ship fired two pods of nineteen rockets. Each rocket further launched eleven hundred and seventy- nine, give or take, flechettes. Between the two planes, four pods, and seventy-six rockets a total of nearly ninety-thousand flechettes took flight.

As if the flechettes weren't enough, the pilots of the Finches armed their machine gun pods and fired several bursts each at whatever clusters of warm, or cooling, bodies were in their view. Then, as the planes neared the beaten area, they further armed and dropped the two incendiary canisters each carried slung under its wings on the hard points nearest the fuselage. These tumbled down, end over end, before reaching the ground and breaking open to spill their contents in long, licking tongues of flame.

After the gunship, then the flechettes, then the Finch's machine gun pods, there were relatively few insurgents or civilians in a position to notice the flame. Most of those who were screamed like girls as they burned.

"That is
illegal, Illegal, ILLEGAL!
" screamed Lindemann at Carrera.

"Nonsense," he answered, more amused by her anger than made angry himself.

"It is forbidden to use flame as a weapon!" she insisted.

"Still nonsense. What you apparently misread was the provision in the applicable convention on using incendiaries expressly to destroy cities and their civilian inhabitants. This was put in, perhaps even sensibly, to try to prevent the kind of city burning that took place during the strategic bombing campaigns of the Great Global War. It has no applicability to tactical uses."

Near tears, for the screams had carried far, even over the roaring of the flames, she said, "But you didn't have to burn them
alive
."

Carrera shrugged. "Explosives would have damaged the minefields we laid to isolate the city. Flame does not."

He didn't add,
Besides, you haven't seen the pictures of the little children these bastards murdered here and elsewhere. They deserved to burn alive.

"Not a single one left," the RPV pilot muttered. "Not a dog or a cat nor, so far as I can tell, even a rat left wandering. They must be getting mighty hungry in there."

This was not exactly time-sensitive information. The pilot merely made a note of it on his flight journal. He'd report it to intelligence as soon as his bird was safely home.

Carrera was back at base, leaving Jimenez in charge forward at the wall of circumvallation around Pumbadeta. The Marines had actually done splendidly in his ZOR, enough so that he wondered if he was perhaps unduly prejudiced by long service with the FS Army. Doing splendidly or not, though, it was worth coming back to check from time to time.

He was standing at a map board, analyzing it for serious incidents that had occurred in the last month as compared to the previous three. There had been a couple more roadside bombings than normal, a couple of suicide bombings more than usual, as well. But firefights were down. This he attributed to most of the enemy fighters being in Pumbadeta, safely—for certain values of safe—locked up.

A private working for the command post took some cigarette ash and a cloth to clean off a small portion of one chart labeled, "Dog and Cat Report." This was divided into days. Carrera noticed that the number had been steadily dropping for a week. Now, the private marked in "0."

Not a single dog or cat to be seen from the air with thermals,
he thought.
They have got to be getting very hungry, indeed. Oh, sure, there are probably a number left. But if so, it's because people are keeping them indoors, either for safety from foragers or to eat themselves.