The Living Will Envy The Dead (38 page)

It got worse.  They’d made the men compliant in their crimes, which made it much harder for them to stop committing crimes, or to escape the Warrior control.  Why do you think that the really evil and unpleasant gangs like the Tongs or the Mafia insist on newcomers committing murder for them as their first test?  To kill someone, anyone, would change them forever and make it impossible for them to escape punishment, if they went to the authorities and confessed.  They had sinned against what they
believed
to be right and the mental stigma would keep them firmly in their place.  We rarely found Warriors who were willing to surrender to us in the early days of the war.

For Summersville, the next week was a nightmare.  The Warriors patrolled everywhere and didn’t hesitate to hand out any punishment they felt the situation deserved, from a whipping to immediate death.  A handful of women, caught on the streets unescorted, were raped at once and then dumped back into their homes, there to wait for their menfolk.  Resistance was quickly and brutally quashed; the handful of people who tried to fight back were quickly apprehended and killed.  A handful of others escaped, somehow, and fled into the darkness towards us, but for most people, the noose held them firmly in place.  They were trapped and at the mercy of the Warriors of the Lord.  They were helpless.

There are basically two ways to run an occupation; hard and brutal, or soft and gentle.  The Warriors favoured the former and had enough manpower and determination – or sheer unthinking fanatical belief  – to make it stick.  Given time, obedience would become habitual and the town’s will would be broken.  They thought that they had all the time in the world.  They might well have been right.  In Iraq, we simply hadn’t had the manpower to dominate the entire country.  The Warriors were operating on a much smaller scale and with much more ruthlessness.  They seemed unbeatable.

We should have intervened at once, but we had problems of our own.

The Warriors intended to destroy us all.

The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation
.

-Robert A. Heinlein

“They’re coming, sir,” Dutch said.  “I can almost smell them.”

I nodded.  There
was
a faint smell in the air, a hint of burning, mixed in with the indefinably awful smell of dead or dying humans.  We had raced down to the FOB as soon as we had heard the news, with Biggles high overhead providing what aerial reconnaissance and air cover he could, but I had the nasty feeling that I wouldn’t be dictating the terms of our next engagement.  Summersville had fallen to the enemy and, with that in their hands, they would know far too much about our defences.  They would certainly know about the FOB…

After all
, I thought grimly,
where else had their messenger gone to deliver their message
.

“We’ve interviewed all the refugees, of course,” Dutch said.  We hadn’t kept the location of the FOB a secret in Summersville.  It might have been a security oversight, but it might also have worked in our favour.  “Only forty-seven people made it out, so far.”

“So far,” I agreed, staring into the distance.  A tall column of black smoke was rising into the air from the direction of Summersville.  Were they cooking everyone a meal, I wondered, or were they burning witches at the stake?  I wouldn’t have bet against the latter.  The Reverend Thomas McNab had been very clear on just how extreme – and unconnected to the remainder of Christianity – the Warriors actually were.  “What have you done with the refugees, Dutch?”

“In a field, under armed guard,” Dutch said promptly, and I sighed in relief.  “We had most of them cuffed to stakes or anything else that was reasonable convenient, just in case, apart from the ones we can vouch for personally.  We have several dozen people here who came from Summersville and could identify most of the refugees.”

“Good,” I said.  I hated to treat American citizens as potential enemies, but there was no choice.  The Warriors of the Lord, just by pulling off a basic Trojan Horse trick, had made it difficult, if not outright impossible, to trust any other refugees.  I recalled, once, a girl I’d met who had raved against the police, because they’d arrested her on suspicion of being a car thief.  A liberal is a conservative who’s just been arrested.  She’d been soured on the police permanently.  “I think we might want to think about relocating them to Stonewall, or at least the ones we can’t trust…”

“Or even the ones who might have relatives in Summersville as well,” Mac put in, from where he'd been peering into the distance.  “I wouldn’t put it past them to play the hostage game.”

I grimaced.  I’d seen that before, in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it had never been anything other than yet another horrific atrocity.  The terrorists had taken someone – normally, but not always, a man – and told him that if he didn’t spy on us, or take a bomb into an attack position, or do something else for them, his family would suffer.  I always hated seeing that, not least because it was much harder to blame the victim, even if he had been trying to kill me at the time.  How could I blame him for doing whatever he needed to do to keep his family alive?  It wasn't as if we’d started with a good reputation as a trustworthy group…and don’t get me started on some of the various Iraqi or Afghani units.  They were sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes corrupt…and if you picked the wrong unit, the results could be disastrous.

“True,” I said, shaking my head.  Take a random group of people – say twenty or so – from a city and chances were that none of them would be related.  Do the same in a small town and you’d probably have several relatives right there, or close personal friends.  I had no one in Ingalls who was related to me, with the possible exception of Rose, who had been my lover for months, but Mac had an entire family.  Dutch had a family of his own in Salem.  What would they do if the Warriors got to them?  “What can we do about that?”

“Short of boosting security and trying to watch for people slipping out of our lines, I doubt that we can do anything,” Dutch said, grimly.  “We don’t have the manpower to rotate anyone who might be remotely suspect – sorry, might be threatened or coerced into becoming a spy – out of the area.”

“Yeah,” Mac said.  “If we can’t stop them here, plenty more fuckers are going to turn to them and convert to their nutty faith.”

I nodded.  A report out of Summersville had suggested that at least a hundred people, mainly men, had converted to the Warrior faith.  I wanted to believe that it was a trick, but the paranoid part of my mind wondered if it was something else, perhaps even a series of real conversions.  A person’s behaviour changes, sometimes sharply, when the environment changes…and the inhabitants of Summersville had already lived though one massive change in the environment.  How many of them would seriously consider converting to the new faith?

Stockholm syndrome
, I thought, glumly.  It was an article of faith among the SP community that hostages, held long enough by any group of terrorists, would start to lean towards the terrorists and their point of view.  It was a defence mechanism in the human mind, I suspected, one that made their torment a little more bearable.  It also explained how…compliant women in various parts of the world were with their own treatment.  Resistance of any kind was seriously counter-survival.  If the entire town was firmly under the Warriors and there was no hope of resistance, then it was quite likely that some of them would break under the strain and convert.  They would rapidly end up becoming the most loyal servants the Warriors could hope for.  After all, they would have burned their bridges behind them.

I said as much.  “Yeah,” Dutch agreed.  “I know exactly what you mean.”

“We should go after them,” Mac said, firmly.  “Ed, we have nearly a thousand soldiers here, with enough ammunition to fight a major battle.  Why don’t we take the offensive now?”

I wanted – needed – to agree with him.  The Marine Corps trains its people to seize the initiative at all times and to operate inside the enemy’s decision-making loop.  I was sure that the Warriors would be far more cumbersome than we were, even though most of the ‘soldiers’ Mac was talking about had never seen a battle in their lives.  Apart from the veterans, the only soldiers who had seen a battle were those who had gone after CORA.  It wasn't the finely-tuned force that I had fought in back in 2003.  We hadn’t known how lucky we had been at the time.  They might be better than the Warriors, but if they attacked against a strong defence…

We might get chewed to ribbons.

And I couldn’t allow that.  We didn’t have enough manpower to waste any of it.  I wanted to intervene as much as Mac did, but I knew something about Summersville’s defences and I knew that if the Warriors had repaired them – and with so much slave labour, it would be fairly easy, if time consuming – we would lose hundreds of men butting our heads against them.  It would be much simpler to force them to attack us, break them – I wouldn’t allow them to slip a force into my rear – and then recover Summersville.  The only question was how long I could wait for them to attack before the demands that
we
attack became irresistible.

I explained that to Mac and Dutch.  Dutch accepted the argument at once; he’d been watching helplessly, after all, as the Warriors secured Summersville and the surrounding area.  There had been a handful of skirmishes, but neither side had seen fit to press the offensive.  Mac was much less impressed, pointing to the American citizens trapped inside the town, at the mercy of the Warriors.  The reports we had received of the disarming of the population and the soul-crushing repression had not been encouraging.  I would have liked to have believed that the townspeople would rise up against them, but I doubted that that was possible.

“Ed, we can’t leave them there much longer,” he protested.  “We have to save them before there’s nothing left to save.”

“And we could end up winning the battle,” I pointed out, “and losing the entire war.”

I cursed – yes, again – the shortage of intelligence.  The refugees had suggested that the Warriors in the town numbered in the thousands.  If that were all they had, taking the risk of attacking might be justified, but I had a sneaking suspicion that their numbers were much higher.  High enough to absorb the losses from our attack and keep coming?  If they didn’t care if they lived or died – a common problem when fanatics were involved – they might be quite happy to take five to one losses…and keep coming.  We couldn’t endure that for long.

“We can’t risk it,” I said, finally.  One thing I like about the military chain of command is that it is inviolate.  (Of course, like all strengths, it can be a disadvantage at times.  The man on the spot normally has a better grasp of what’s going on than the guy skulking in the rear areas, or in Washington, trying to micromanage at very long distance.)  “Mac, we cannot risk heavy losses.”

He nodded, sullenly.  “I don’t know how long our morale will hold up,” he said.  “It looks very much as if we’re just waiting here and allowing them to get on with it.”

“They’re going to attack us,” Dutch said, firmly.  “We’re blocking their route up to Ingalls and the other Principle Towns.”  Salem, part of me noted with a droll moment of amusement, was northwards of Ingalls and would probably be the last to fall.  If the Warriors had the resources to attack all of the towns at the same time, we might as well seek the best terms we could for surrender.  “They have to come here, Mac, and when they do we’ll beat the holy living shit out of them.”

“Of course we will,” I agreed, grateful for the change in subject.  I shared Mac’s desire for immediate action, but I couldn’t agree to take the risk.  Not for the first time, I wished for the entire 1
st
Marine Division, or even the 3
rd
Infantry.  Hell, I would have sold my soul for a few more heavy weapons and tanks.  “We’ll just inspect the defences and then wait for intelligence from the scouts.”

Dutch had taken the precaution of sending a handful of scouts out to try to gather what intelligence they could.  I doubted that they would learn much – they weren't fully-qualified SF soldiers, just people who liked sneaking around – but it wasn't something that we could overlook.  I had sent Biggles down here for the same reason, after all, and I’d even had a nearby field adapted to serve as an airfield.  I’d have liked an entire squadron or two of Apaches, but I’d settle for Biggles and his aircraft.  I could even hear him buzzing around in the air.

He'd also done well with the defences, I agreed.  They’d dug trenches, emplaced barriers and concealed mines everywhere that the enemy might use as a line of advance.  The designer of the defences had had a nasty sense of humour, Dutch said; he’d used barbed wire to catch unwanted guests, trapping them in the line of fire from emplaced machine guns, or leading them into minefields.  There were parts of the defences that looked criminally weak, at least to civilian eyes, but that was a military trick as old as war itself.  The enemy would come onwards, scenting victory, only to run into pre-registered mortar fire and other, nastier tricks.  Patty and Stacy, two of seventeen snipers, even had places to hide and work their deadly art.