That didn’t end it. Containing the riot was one thing, dispersing it was another. The mob was contained, certainly, but it still existed. There was an answer to that as well, one contained in two large bus-like vehicles that pulled up behind the lines of beleaguered riot police. Safe behind the now-steady control line, their engines revved up and white jets shot over the police line, plowing into the rioters. Water cannon.
The operators were good, some kept the jets high, hitting the rioters in the face and chest, the power of the jets sweeping the rioters off their feet, hurling them back into each other. Others kept the jets low, knocking the rioters legs out from under them. Legs and arms broke, jaws were crushed and people drowned as the remorseless water jets drove the mob back. As they fell slowly back, the water cannon started to split the mob into smaller groups. Sometime, there would come a point where the groups would be too small for the mob to maintain its group identity and it would dissolve into a mass of terrified civilians. Then it would be over.
Only those who had organized the riot had expected the water cannon. As the mob had pushed forward, they’d moved onto the roof tops with Molotov Cocktails, glass bottles filled with gasoline and fitted with a crude fuse. The bottles arced down, flaring in the line of riot police and hitting the water cannon trucks. Now, the gendarmes and their pistols were the lesser of the threats facing the riot police and they started to edge back again.
The water cannon backed up also, their jets hosing the ground, washing the burning gasoline towards the mob.
Even that might not have been enough; but the Gendarme commander had expected the Molotov Cocktails and had a lesson for those who used them. Unnoticed by the mob and its organizers were a series of small trucks, scarcely bigger than taxis. Only they were blue, armored and had a turret. With a long-barreled gun.
As the mob surged forward in the wake of the volley of Molotov Cocktails, a roar and plague of fireflies filled the street. The armored cars were equipped with 14.5 millimeter machine-guns and they were firing armor-piercing incendiary - tracer ammunition. They didn’t make the mistake of firing over the heads of the crowd, reinforcing its sense of invulnerability, instead they fired directly into it, the high-velocity API-Ts tearing through three, four or five bodies before the heavy bullets finally came to a halt.
Up above, helicopters cruised over the rooftops, their door gunners spraying the Molotov cocktail throwers from above. Normally, in military work every fourth or fifth round was a tracer but this time was different. Every round left its streak of fire behind, demonstrating the sheer volume of fire that was being poured into the rioting mob.
The crowd couldn’t take the deadly machine-guns. Those at the front broke and ran, trying to get away, somewhere, anywhere away from the swarms of fireflies that were tearing them apart. Those at the back of the mob continued to press forward, and in the middle, the two surges collided, fighting to get through each other.
As the armored cars lashed the mob with their heavy machine-guns, piles of bodies started to mass at each intersection. The opposing crowds were getting in each other’s way, and effectively the mass of people formed into a single large, static target. Eventually, even the organizers couldn’t hold the crowd and it broke into a mass of individuals frantically trying to find shelter from the armored cars and the helicopters overhead. As they ran, the survivors heard the staccato crackle of pistol fire as the Gendarmes finished off the wounded.
Eventually, it was over. The streets were empty except for the emergency crews clearing the bodies that carpeted the main streets of the slum. As night drew down, they took the corpses away for burial. The shaken riot police buried their dead and quietly asked themselves what had come to their city. The gendarmes cleaned their weapons, reloaded their vehicles and waited for the next time. In the slums, the black-turbaned Mullahs once again started their sermons, inciting the people to go out again the next day and attack the security forces that had martyred so many of their friends and relatives.
CHAPTER FOUR: SKIRMISH
El Khalq, Cairo, Egypt
The city of Cairo was dying. Port Said Road had become the front line, between the administrative heart of the city and the mosque districts of El Khalq, HI Dhab and El Kamaliya. It was a battle of wills and of endurance. Could the Mullahs pour people into the streets faster than the gendarmerie could pour bullets into the people? Would the people run out of the will to die before the Government ran out of the will to kill?
All over the city people looked to the pall of smoke that darkened the sun and wondered at the madness that was taking place. Not all the people of the city however, over the last few days posters showing the acid-mutilated faces of women who had dared to appear in public unveiled had started to surface all over the cities. The potential victims were taking no chances and the sight of women in enveloping burkas was turning what had once been a vibrant cosmopolitan city into something else entirely.
The casualty rates were running enormously in favor of the security forces, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rioters killed for every security man lost. Not that the police and Gendarmerie casualties had been light After the first day, there had been improvised mines laid in advance of the riots. The rioters themselves had been supported by rifle fire, most of it wildly inaccurate and hopelessly ineffective yet every so often single shots would pick off key members of the security force teams. The mob itself was killing few security personnel but the explosions and snipers were racking up an increasing score.
Yet the problem was that the essential need to contain the situation in the capital was pulling in the police and gendarmerie from the countryside and there, too, the situation was deteriorating. Government-built secular schools were being burned down and their teachers killed. Coptic Christian churches were meeting the same fate, the buildings burned, the priests killed, the congregations scattered and hunted down. The police had been either killed by mobs or had decided discretion was the better part of valor and had left to safer regions. Buses had been ambushed on the roads and their occupants killed, rail lines had been blown up at key points. The ability of the population to move freely had gone and with it the ability to support a functioning society. It wasn’t just the city of Cairo that was dying, Egypt itself, as a modern state, was on life support and losing the battle to stay breathing.
Cairo remained the key. The day there started the way all the earlier ones had, the hysterical ranting tirades from the Mullahs and the screaming mob pouring into the streets to attack anything that wasn’t part of their creed. They’d driven the riot police back but then the Gendarmerie had arrived to stiffen them and their heavy machine-guns had driven the rioters back. Now, the Port Said Road was a no-man’s land, carpeted with the bodies of the rioting mob that had tried to cross it into the Abdin, the area of the city occupied by the Ministries and financial houses.
On the east side of Port Said Road, the rooftops were occupied by the groups armed with Molotov cocktails, attempting to throw their firebombs across the road at the police and Gendarmerie who held the west side of the road. It was just that bit too far though, and all their actions achieved was to attract the attention of a Gendarmerie helicopter that swept parallel with the road, spraying the east-side roofs with machine-gun fire.
As the helicopter passed, two men scrambled from cover, one carrying a longish tube with a complex looking box mounted on top. The gunner waited until the helicopter was moving away from them, its engine exhaust silhouetted against a cool part of the sky. The box on top of the launcher warbled then gave a continuous growl as the seeker locked on. A squeeze of the trigger, a blast from the tube, and a brown-gray spiral of smoke shot up from the launcher, heading straight for the Gendarmerie helicopter.