Jimenez looked out over the dry and barren desolation that stretched from the circumvallating berm to the edge of the city. There was one almost full moon tonight, Hecate, plus partial luminescence from another, Bellona. Thus, even without using his night vision goggles, he could see easily across the open expanse.
Oh, oh, he thought as the first armed combatants stepped out into the light and began to walk forward.
"Engage now, sir?" asked the platoon centurion lying next to Jimenez on the friendly side of the berm. He had seen them too.
"No… no, wait until they hit the leading edge of the minefield. Any we can draw out and kill are that many fewer we'll have to fight when we finally assault the town."
The speakers on one of the near minarets crackled to life as the boys emerged from their shelters on the edge of town. A muezzin began reciting from the Koran over the speakers, his recital focused on the path of holy war.
One boy-Dawud thought it was the last one who had been taken in the vehicle that had brought him in-lay down in dirt, apparently taking cover. Dawud paused briefly, his eyes glancing over to look down at the boy. He began moving forward again almost instantly as a burst of automatic fire coming from behind impacted the slacker, causing blood to spurt from the body as it caused little geysers of dust to spurt from the ground.
From the speakers the muezzin decreed that death was to be the lot of slackers and cowards.
"This feels dirty as shit, sir," the centurion told Jimenez as the mob flowed closer.
I'm trying to remember the last clean war there was, Jimenez thought to himself. To the centurion he said, "Nothing for it but to get it over with then. But give them a couple more minutes. Until we can be sure none are going to be able to escape."
Jimenez slid down the berm's embankment and gestured for his radio telephone operator to hand over the microphone. With the radio, he called the command post to ask if there were a gunship overhead. Informed that there was not but that one would be overhead within ten minutes, he cursed and began the crawl back up to the berm's edge. His RTO followed.
"Do you have a forward observer attached?" he asked the centurion.
"Yes, sir. Shall I get him?"
"Please. Immediately."
Dawud's young heart pounded in his chest as the men following began to shout, " Allahu akbar, CHARRRGE!" while firing their weapons from behind the boys and forward, over their heads. The shouting grew more distant the farther Dawud's legs carried him.
In his brief course of instruction the orphan had been taught to fire the rifle once each time his left leg hit the ground. He began to do so, keeping the rifle generally pointed to the north. Each burst took him a little by surprise. He found the sensation of recoil both unpleasant and frightening. He found the thought of being shot in the back by the men he assumed were still following to be more so.
There was an explosion ahead, somewhere to Dawud's right front. When he looked at the flash it was just in time to see three bodies flying through the air before hitting the ground. At the same time, two sets of bright shining lines were drawn across the front, one coming from the east and one from the west. Not only didn't Dawud know these were tracers, he was far too ignorant of matters military to realize that one tracer also meant another four bullets. He also didn't know enough to identify the explosion as having come from a land mine.
XVI.
"This is just fucking murder," the centurion said to Jimenez over the continuous rattle of machine guns assaulting both men's ear and from both sides. He repeated, "Just fucking murder."
Jimenez ignored it, concentrating on the bodies being harvested in long lines at the edge of the minefield and where the machine guns were laid along their final protective lines.
The centurion's right. This is just murder. These poor bastards are clueless. It isn't even worth calling in some artillery or mortars on them. Why waste the shells when they just offer themselves up for butchery?
Dawud never saw the bullets that cut his legs out from under him. One minute he was running forward, the next he felt both legs struck out from underneath and found himself spinning, literally head over heels, to fall to the dirt.
It didn't hurt at first, nor even for several minutes. Then the burning began, followed by pain such as the boy had never even imagined. He began to cry and then, as the pain grew greater, infinitely great, to scream.
His screams were no more than a few notes in the hellish symphony.
The centurion's eyes glowed even in the darkness. He shrugged, "So court-martial me, sir, but I'll be damned if I'll let that shit go on. Just listen to them, won't you? Those were just fucking kids. Just kids! So I'm going out-we've got clear lanes through the wire and mines-and I'm bringing them back with me, as many as I can and as many as any of my men who'll volunteer to go with me can."
Jimenez sighed. He'd not have the centurion court-martialed, not when he wanted to go out himself. Poor little bastards. They are just kids, too. Maybe one man might sound like that. But not every one of hundreds.
"Wait a few minutes until I can get a smoke screen laid then, centurion. Then you can go."
Field Hospital Number Two, Legio Del Cid, 2/8/462 AC
When Dawud came out of surgery he was unconscious and legless. The surgeons had tried but… well, the damage had been too great. Keeping the legs would only have condemned the boy to a harder death from gangrene.
He remembered nothing of how he had come to be captured and treated, though after the centurion who had ventured out into noman's-land had come by the field hospital to check on him, Dawud had been told the story by a Sumeri auxiliary nurse.
He'd miss the legs, he knew. Then again, what use were legs to a beggar boy? Perhaps it had been a fair trade. After all, at least he was eating well.
The boy bore no grudges. He didn't even know who to blame, the men who had shot him or the men who had driven him forth to be shot. In his world, bad things happened-usually to him-and it wasn't really anyone's fault. Il hamdu l'illah.
In any case, he had no hard feelings. The Sumeris working the field hospital had even suggested that it might be possible to go to school again on the legion's ticket. "Stranger things have happened," they'd all agreed. So, when the intelligence warrant officer had come to question Dawud, he had held nothing back. Not that he had much to tell. Yet from little bits of color are mighty works of art created. Dawud had a few such little bits to offer.
Given the ready cooperation, it was unsurprising that the boy was identified to the PSYOP maniple as a possible source for a telling interview.
Pumbadeta, Sumer, 3/8/462 AC
It was Dawud's voice carried on the dusty air from the loudspeakers of the legion to the ears of the men, and they were virtually all men, remaining inside the city.
Listening to it, Ehmed al Hanawi sat in a circle of other Pumbadetites. Like them his face was darkened with fury. Like them, too, his empty stomach rumbled. Like them his teeth ground against each other.
"So much for my boy's having volunteered for martyrdom," he cursed. "Taken without warning and forced into a meat grinder by our 'liberators.' The bastards."
The others nodded. Ehmed was the only one of the group who had lost a son in this way. But they were all fathers, and many of them still had boys trapped inside the town.
One of them men lifted up his Samsonov rifle and shook it. "I say we clean these bastards out. Who the fuck do they think they are, bringing this trouble upon us? Clean 'em out, I say."
Though almost all of the men assembled were at least functionally literate, only one among them could have been called really well educated. Mullah Thaqib had even attended school in far off Yithrab. He, too, had borne arms to the meeting. Those who insisted on calling Islam the "religion of peace" had obviously missed something important.