"Heads up," Cruz ordered. "White flag, two o'clock."
"Surrender?" asked Sanchez.
"No… don't think so. The Sumeri looks like he still has fight in him. To me it looks like a request for truce to let medical and burial parties in."
Robles lifted his light machine gun as if to fire. Cruz saw this, understood the anger and bitterness that might lead a young man to violate the flag of truce and said, "Knock it off, Robles. We got even for your brother one hundred times over." The private, reluctantly, lowered the weapon's muzzle.
The signifer for the century, a broad but filthy bandage covering half his face and one eye, walked out into the square, a white-well, it had started as white-flag tied onto a pole he held up and ahead. He and the Sumeri met midway, almost at the colossal statue. They nodded at each other in a way that was, if not quite friendly, at least respectful.
The Sumeri made a sweeping gesture which took in the square and all the bodies, living and dead, within it. Then he made something like the sign of the cross, but on one arm, pointing for emphasis at the bandage over the signifer's face.
The signifer nodded agreement, then pointed to his watch. He held up the fingers of one hand, twice. Ten minutes?
The Sumeri shook his head regretfully, once again sweeping around the square with one arm. Too many bodies… and our people are stretched.
Agreeing, the signifer held up all the fingers of the same hand, and repeated the gesture four times. At this the Sumeri seemed happy… or as happy as one could be under the circumstances. He then flashed his five finger sign once again and made as if putting a pistol in his holster. Start the truce, officially, in five minutes. The signifer agreed.
The Sumeri then made a sign as if drawing his pistol and firing it three times into the air. That will be the signal to resume.
At this the signifer nodded, as well. Then both shook hands and walked back.
Five minutes later, parties of legionaries and Sumeris warily entered the square, no weapons in evidence. They searched impartially for the wounded, of which there were a few. These the Balboans took away, irrespective of uniform. They could care for the wounded much better than could the Sumeris' poor medical staff. Moreover, while there was some advantage to making the Sumeris take their own wounded, to make them eat up the little food remaining, Carrera had ordered that starvation was not, in this case, to be used as a weapon.
The dead were taken away by their respective sides, the Sumeri dead to a mosque that had been turned into a morgue not far away, the Balboans to another ad hoc morgue that had been set up in the gymnasium of a captured high school. All the dead were treated with the greatest respect by both sides.
Both sides moved as briskly as exhausted men could be expected to. It was not quite briskly enough. Nearing the end of the truce the original Sumeri officer-lacking decent body armor, generally, they had many more dead to carry away-asked for another ten minutes, which was granted.
Then, exactly thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds after the first white flag was shown, the bagpipes picked up, three well-spaced shots were fired into the air, and the slaughter resumed.
The only way tanks could lead in city fighting was if there was no real fighting to be done, in other words, if the enemy was either nonexistent or worthless. With a brave and competent enemy, and Sada's boys had shown themselves to be that, it was generally suicide for armor to lead. In that case, and in this, infantry led while armor followed and supported at a distance, suppressing with machine guns or clearing the way with the main gun. They'd proven particularly useful in clearing streets of the mines and booby traps the Sumeris had laid down lavishly.
The really bad part was that the streets made it impossible to use the armor in mass. Instead, one tank or sometimes two would be attached to one infantry century. Sometimes they'd have an Ocelot or two in support and sometimes not. In either case, though, when the rifle, sniper and machine-gun fire came in the crews had to button up and hope the infantry could keep the enemy's antitank teams away while the tank dealt with the threat that it sometimes couldn't really see very well.
In the close confines of the town of Ninewa, and despite having quite good night vision equipment, Perez, del Rio and Mendoza just couldn't see very well, generally. Not having slept much in days didn't help, either.
Still worse, they had no really good communications with the infantry century they were supposed to support. Their blasted antennae had been replaced; that wasn't the problem. Nor was it negligence on the part of the infantry. The grunts had simply lost so many leaders that a sergeant was leading the entire group with the senior section leader a mere corporal, and only one of those. The century had basically lost its ability to coordinate with their supporting tank.
Even worse than that, this century was not the original one. The tanks were in such short supply, never more than sixteen to begin and four had been lost completely, that they had to shunt around from unit to unit.
Neither Perez, nor del Rio, nor Mendoza could remember when they'd slept last. Mendoza thought he might have eaten something the day prior but couldn't be sure. The stewed camel over rice was not something the cohort mess section was really used to preparing, but they'd been reduced to that for the last three days. He might have skipped it yesterday; hard to remember. Too sleepy, too "Jorge, back up! Back up! Back up! Gunner, HE, RGL, two o'clock. Jorge, goddammit, back UP!"
Still half asleep Mendoza automatically shifted gears and backed the tank fifty meters. Before he had gone that distance, though, a rocket-launched grenade lanced out from the half-shattered wreck of an adobe building. It missed the tank, barely, and exploded against a wall behind Jorge and to his left. The tank's automatic defense system hadn't fired because all the blocks on the front had been used up and there hadn't been any spares to replace them. Maybe tomorrow…
Del Rio was apparently not half asleep since the main gun roared even before Jorge applied the brakes. That woke him up fully and in time to watch the adobe building to his right front disintegrate to dust.
Ninewa, Command Post, Legio del Cid, 6/3/461 AC
A Cricket's engine sputtered outside where it had come to a hasty landing just a few seconds ahead of a heavy machine gun's tracers. A short, dark, and stout man, chest still swathed in bandages, climbed painfully down from its high door.
Parilla had to be helped into the building. The first thing he heard upon entering was Patricio Carrera, cursing a storm into a radio. "Listen carefully, you miserable son of a bitch. I said I want…"
Parilla sat heavily and wearily in a folding chair inside. Outside the Cricket that had brought him had its tail picked up by four legionaries and turned to face away from the wind. Once loaded, it would taxi again and face into the wind for takeoff. Another pair of men, wearing white armbands with red crosses, loaded a stretcher in through the rear of the aircraft, then helped another legionary with his chest and shoulder heavily bandaged to climb into the front passenger seat. Loaded, the Cricket took off again in a cloud of propeller-raised dust. Behind the Cricket a NA-23 Dodo with "Lolita" painted on the nose waited patiently while more wounded either boarded or, if stretcher cases, were loaded.
Carrera took one look and asked, "Raul, what the fuck are you doing here? You're still hurt."
Parilla sighed and answered, "I couldn't stand it anymore, lying there while they brought in more and more wounded kids, most of them worse off than I was. So, one of the advantages of being Dux," and he emphasized the title as if to say, which means people do what I tell them to, generally, "is that when I say, 'I want to be flown to the front,' someone is going to bust ass to get me flown to the front."