Highway 310, Northwest of ar-Rebchel, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
The lights shone through the trees. Even before seeing the lights, though, Petra had heard the sound of the engines. With each meter closer, with each increase in the noise, with each glimpse of the headlights through the trees, the pounding in her chest grew.
For a moment she wanted to run into the little place inside herself where she'd hid during her rape, the same place that sheltered her during all the other abuses that had followed. And yet . . .
Petra picked up a detonator in her left hand, wrapping her delicate fingers around it. With her right she flicked off the thick wire safety that would keep the squeeze lever from closing. Her right then took control of the other detonator. With her right thumb she flicked off the safety on that one.
'Wait . . . wait . . . wait,' she whispered to herself as the column of trucks grew closer to the point she was supposed to set off the mines.
'Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . .' Petra scrunched down into her hole with just the top of her head and her eyes showing.
She misjudged it, just slightly. Or perhaps Hans had misjudged the proper spot to mark where she should squeeze the levers of the blasting machines. Whichever was the case, the mines detonated splendidly, all twelve of them, sending roughly eleven thousand half- ounce steel cylinders skipping gleefully along and across the road.
Men who had been sitting or standing up in the backs of trucks were scythed down with a collective moan, their organs and blood spilling across the truck beds and the road. Drivers and co-drivers, sitting up front, fared no better. As for the trucks, tires were blasted out, gas tanks were ruptured, lights and windscreens smashed. One truck, its front tires blasted off, went nose down to the roadbed, twisted to the right, and began a body-spilling roll that ended only went it struck a tree, broadside. Still another exploded in a fireball as the steel fragments not only spilled its liquid fuel but struck a spark off of the frame. Another of the five trucks struck went slightly off road until running head on into a tree. One, too close to a mine, was blown on its side. The last truck, with no living driver at the wheel, plowed into the truck before it.
Though there were men left alive in the kill zone, and even men left unhurt, there was no one left unshocked. It was a massacre.
Except, unfortunately for the lead truck. It had gotten
The
'Faster, dolt!'
It was the worst sound she'd ever heard. Men screamed, wept, and begged for aid. And most of them, she suspected, were as blond- haired and blue-eyed as she was.
Petra covered her ears with her hands against the sound. In the process, a small device, no bigger than a hearing aid, was knocked to the dirt below.
She'd expected to take some satisfaction in striking a blow against the Caliphate. All she felt was a desire to vomit.
With that, Petra crawled out of the hole onto her belly, her submachine gun clutched tightly in one hand. She kept crawling, skinning hands, elbows and knees, and getting a little mud in the submachine gun, until the light from the burning truck was dim. Then she got up to a crouch, glanced all around like a hunted animal, turned to her right and ran.
She never noticed that she'd left her radio, ground by her own feet into the mud and dirt of the hole, behind.
Flight Seven Nine Three, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
Perhaps a hundred people lived in the village below, crowded in behind a rickety and crude wooden fence. As the airship settled down just outside that fence, Matheson's voice came over the public address system.
'Infidels,' he said. 'Infidels, assemble to be counted and assessed.'
Lee/Ling looked at Matheson as if to ask,
Matheson's answering glare said,
Fearfully, the doors to the little shacks opened up and people began to step out.
'That's our cue,' Matheson said to the newly armed and just liberated cargo slaves. 'Follow me.'
Each man, Matheson and the two slaves, had wrapped themselves in bed linen to simulate robes. On their heads they wore checked tablecloths held in place by short pieces of rope, tied in the back.
Matheson had his pistol strapped to the outside of the robes. The slaves carried his and Ling's submachine guns authoritatively.
Lee lowered the starboard side passenger ramp just in time for Matheson and his two escorts to debark. They walked over to the fence briskly. Forcing the gate open, Matheson demanded, 'Who is the headman here?'
A stoop shouldered German advanced cautiously. At a distance of about six paces he got to one knee and answered, 'I am, master.'
Matheson swung his pistol in a broad arc, taking in the entire populace of the town. 'Your people are needed for emergency work. Get them aboard. Now. On your head if so much as a single wretched soul escapes.'
'But our crops—' the headman began to protest, pointing to where the airship had crushed the shoots in the fields.
'You will be compensated; that, or receive a tax remittance. Now cease your whining and get loaded. Bring your children. You will be gone too long for them to care for themselves. Food will be provided.'
'Was that really necessary?' Lee asked, while awaiting word from Shanghai that the two hunting jets were gone.
Matheson shrugged. 'If we'd tried to hold them there, some one of them might have doubted our official status and gone running to report. As is, they're convinced of it...even if some of them are still hiding in the village, they think they're hiding
'Unfortunately, now we're stuck with them,' Lee finished.
'Will that affect the flight?'
Lee shrugged Ling's shoulders. 'Seven tons of emaciated Christians? I think
'To risk
Lee/Ling stiffened. 'Shanghai says the fighters are turning for home. Communications intercepts say they took off with the fuel in the tanks . . . and nobody had bothered to make sure the tanks were full when they parked them. How did these people ever get control of a continent?'
'Someone without the will to keep it gave it to them.'