Carnifex (88 page)

If the artillery had induced fear, the aerial attack created instantaneous bedlam. People ran confused in all direction. Women screamed, children cried, and men called to the Almighty for aid. Those same men, stumbling and cursing, fumbled for weapons even as the first six aircraft began their passes, harvesting before them the broken bodies of many score.

Once over the eastern side of the camp the first six attack planes released a dozen canisters of napalm, two each, one from each wing. These tumbled down from hardpoints put on the heavily modified crop dusters. The canisters hit the ground then split, broke open, and ignited. Long tongues of fierce orange flame licked for hundreds of yards through the camp, scouring their paths free of life. The pilots aimed, insofar as they could, for groups of armed men. Still, the target area was confusing and the aircraft moved fast. Warriors died, yes, but along with them women and children twisted and shrieked and were turned to writhing human torches before being reduced to charcoal and ash.

The morning smells suddenly changed from savory to sickening as cooked human meat added its contribution to the air.

The first wave split off into two "vics" of three, one veering north, one south, to come around for another pass each from those directions. The Turbo-Finches, the modified crop dusters, could turn on a drachma.

The camp now alerted, the second wave took some fire as it made its strafe. No matter, the aircraft were armored against small arms and even had a chance against heavy machine gun fire. They were also less vulnerable to shoulder fired anti-aircraft rockets than either helicopters or high performance jets. Carrying a lethal load, they were flown by men in whose hearts hate battled for dominance with the desire to be done, to finish this, to go home. These fresh, rearing warhorses had many times proven their worth in the brutal and bitter campaign.

This the second wave demonstrated as they swooped across at a higher level than the first. Not bothering to use their machine guns, cannon or rockets, they each released an aerodynamic cylinder from underneath before giving their engines full throttle and racing away. The cylinders fell a distance then, with a
pop
, broke open and kicked out three smaller cylinders and a number of glowing sparklers.

The smaller cylinders burst at a predetermined height, spreading an inflammable aerosol.

The searing tongues of napalm flame heating her face, Khalifa twisted her head and body searching frantically for the sign of a refuge. The two children now in her arms screamed and cried. Like mindless animals they twisted, trying to escape her grasp. She held them all the tighter; so tight the children could feel her own heart beating frantically beneath her breast.

Which way to turn? Which way to turn? Already Khalifa could hear the steady whop-whop-whop of the helicopters fast approaching. This was the merciless enemy who hunted without either giving rest or, apparently, taking it. She did not know what they would do to her in the event she was captured. The ignorance was worse than knowledge might have been. She
had
to escape somehow; her and the children.

And then Khalifa heard a faint series of tiny explosions overhead. She looked upward and to the east . . . 

Proximity fused, the thermobaric cylinders fell to a preset distance above the ground before splitting and then detonating. Their aerosol clouds spread outward rapidly, mixing with the air and growing to touch upon each other. In a short time, a moment, one finger of one cloud touched a sparkler.

Khalifa was not one of the lucky ones, those directly under the blast. They died quickly, having barely a chance to voice an unheard scream before the near-nuclear explosion obliterated them.

Instead, she and her children stood at the periphery. She felt her children torn from her grasp as she and they were picked up and thrown. Khalifa could not see them because the intense heat had burned away her face and eyes along with most of the skin on the front side of her body.

High pressure air pounded her internal organs and, forcing its way into her lungs, expanded and tore them.

Briefly Khalifa flew through the air on the leading edge of the blast wave, a human tracer trailing flame. A violent stop against a large rock broke her spine—a small mercy as at least the pain from her lower body went away with the break. Then again, with ruptured organs and lungs, and a body flash-burned, the mercy was small indeed.

Then the vacuum struck as the air rushed back in to fill the space it had occupied before the blast. Khalifa felt it ripping the air through her mouth. She felt her lungs loosen away from the inside of her chest. She, along with others who had survived so far, was pulled inward even faster than she had been thrown away.

Racing back to the encampment, Abdul Aziz caught sight of the first half dozen
Shturmoviks
—some of the
mujahadin
still used the term they had picked up during the Volgan occupation of two decades before— sweeping across. Uselessly and fruitlessly, he fired his rifle at them as they passed overhead. Looking desperately between the swaths of flame left in their wake, Aziz caught sight of his family, still standing safe between flaming strips.

Even as he watched helplessly, his family was blasted to ruin by the second wave.

He mouthed a soundless, "Nooo."

Then Abdul Aziz ibn Kalb turned and ran.

Above and at a distance from the perimeter of the camp's smoking ruins helicopters rotored in and landed. From their bellies they began discharging troops. Some dropped off sling loads of artillery and ammunition. Some dropped off other loads of supplies.

Among those landing troops, one helicopter was distinguished by virtue of having discharged only a few men. One of these was Carrera. His face was mostly covered against the wind and the sun. A clear area had been left open, however, revealing eyes that glowed when the angle to the rising sun was just right. Sometimes, so swore both enemies and friends, the eyes glowed on their own.

The eyes glowed now. Through them the Carrera watched calmly as the heavy mortar crews struggled to manhandle the guns out of the helicopters and into firing position. He watched for a few moments before, satisfied, he turned his attention elsewhere.

Below the hill on which he stood, some fifteen hundred meters from the camp, one of his infantry cohorts spread out to sweep across. Largely ineffective fire fell among them, bullets half spent shooting little demons of dust into the air. The advance went on regardless.

Carrera lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The magnified gaze swept across the camp where some hundreds of the enemy tried to slow down or stop his onslaught. Past them, so he saw, more hundreds of women and children—and some few spiritless men—crawled, walked and ran from the carnage.

His sweeping gaze touched upon a child of indeterminate sex, tugging at the half carbonized corpse of what was probably its mother.
My children's mother was burned to death and yours warbled with glee,
he thought, without any trace of emotion . . . he could not
afford
emotion, not now.
Still, little one, I am sorry for you.

Further on, near the edge of the artillery-laid minefield, men, women and children who had sought that route for safety lay along an irregular line. It was much too far for Carrera to make out any details. His mind supplied them even so.
You are not so broken as my own babies were when they were murdered.

Carrera's thoughts were interrupted by the soft padding of footsteps behind him. He recognized their source. Few walked with such near perfect quiet as his prized chief of his almost equally prized Pashtun scouts.

"Subadar Masood?" he said without turning.

"Sir!" exclaimed the senior Pashtun Scout, springing to attention near his side. A smile briefly crossed the subadar's seamed, craggy face.
You, alone of all men, can hear me coming,
he thought.

"The Scouts? All paths east and west?"

"Sealed tighter than a houri's hole, sir."

"Very good. I want as many prisoners as possible. Rewards are offered."

"Yes, sir. So my men have been told."

In the much colder air above the high pass breath gathered to frost a gray-shot beard. Hard they came, those puffs of air, pumped from struggling, bellowing lungs. They burst outward to form little horizontal pines before settling to and disappearing against the ubiquitous ice and snow.

Hard pumped the heart beneath the lungs, forcing warmth to freezing limbs, forcing blood to a brain straining to make sense of disaster.

Close to the ground, seeking to make himself invisible—one with the snow and the ice—the fugitive Abdul Aziz huddled. His eyes and ears quested for some route of escape, some way to survive to carry on the fight and avenge his family and his cause. Nothing looked very promising. Nothing sounded so, either.

In the cold, still air sound carried very well. The fugitive's ears caught easily the irregular sound of shots and screams. The fugitive cursed his enemies, then let fall a single tear which froze on his face before it had descended much more than an inch.

Ahead, the steady whop-whop-whop of helicopters told of escape routes being systematically cut off. Unseen, far above, the harsh drone of the
Shturmoviks
and the cursed infidels' gunships swept along, hunting for any who might have escaped the camp. Behind, the baying of dogs, hunting dogs with the sharpest of noses, told of other fugitives being tracked through the snow, ice and rock. From all around, at odd times, came shouts of triumph as some mercenary, apostate Pashtun Scout dragged a cowering man, woman, or child from a hiding place.

Despair crowded the fugitive's heart and mind; despair at loss, despair at ruin.

The thought of his own wife and children, now forever lost, was almost more than he could bear. "They'll pay. By the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah, I swear they will pay for this," muttered the fugitive to himself.

The pitiless ice made no answer.

Havaldar Mohammad Kamal didn't answer either; though he heard. He pointed to one of his grinning men, then to another, and made a slight finger motion in the direction from which the sound had come.

The scouts glanced at each other. A wordless plan formed between them. Carrera would pay bounties for live prisoners. They'd take this one alive if they could.

Silently the two designated scouts began to creep forward and around. The military arts their prey had learned only partially, they had grown up with.

Robert Hennessey, Senior, sat quietly on a bench in the central park of this great metropolitan city on the Federated States West Coast. In the sun Hennessey read his newspaper. More especially, Hennessey read for word of the fighting in the Mar Furioso, the great sea of Terra Nova, where his son, Lieutenant Robert Hennessey, Junior, led a platoon of Federated States Marines in the long, slow, bloody drive across the sea. The sooner the war was over, the sooner young Bob was safe, the better, as far as the old man was concerned.

After all, I'm not getting any younger and I need the boy to take over the chair of the firm.

There was grounds for hope now, despite the obscenely long casualty lists posted every day from the fighting across central Taurus and on the islands of the Furioso. Just a few days before the papers had blared out of a second Yamatan city blasted to cinders by some new weapon developed in secret.

Whatever it takes to get the Yamatans to surrender short of invading the home islands,
Robert Senior thought.

There was hardly a family in the entire country to be found that hadn't lost a son or a husband. Hennessey heard weeping and looked over to where a woman, formerly playing with her children on the grass, had broken down in tears.

Whatever it takes.

He heard a familiar horn beep. Folding his paper, Hennessey arose from the park bench to walk to where his chauffeur was exiting the limousine to hold open the door. He gave himself this one break, one hour every morning, to relax in the central park away from his responsibilities. The hour never seemed to last long enough.

From the corner of one eye Hennessey thought he saw a bright streak across the sky. He glanced up just as the streak became a flash that consumed him, his city, the young, weeping woman, her children, trees and buildings and park benches . . . everything.

"Target One . . . destroyed, High Admiral . . . . Target Two . . . . destroyed."

Silently, High Admiral Laurence Napier, nodded his head. If ever a man looked spiritually crushed, that man was he, for he had just given the order and overseen the extinction of over one million people.

What choice had I, though? My orders from the Consensus were clear; they allowed no room for maneuver. "Any detonation of a nuclear weapon for purposes of advancing a war effort on Terra Nova is to be met by an equivalent or greater response from the United Earth Peace Fleet." I picked the two smallest cities in the Federated States for that . . . the two smallest that had a chance of working, in any case, San Fernando and Botulph. What else could I do?

Suddenly, Napier felt the overwhelming urge to vomit. Without another word he arose from his command chair and raced for his own quarters. Halfway to his quarters he found he could not restrain himself, emptying the contents of his stomach for some nameless prole to clean up. Still heaving, Napier continued on to his quarters.

There he sat in silent horror at the oceans of blood on his hands. He imagined it all, the young children playing on the grass, the old men reading their morning papers, the flash, the fireball . . . 

In the end, the imagining was too much. Napier removed a pistol from his desk, made sure it was loaded, placed the muzzle to the roof of his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

This left another mess for the proles to clean up.