substantial, even crippling, fine to retrieve any of their people who had been found, unauthorized, in the BZOR. Others, who toed the line and did not slant their reporting, were made welcome and, generally speaking, treated rather well. Indeed, the Balboans went out of their way to welcome those who engaged in truly constructive criticism.
The Balboans proved not to be above conducting 'sting' operations to humiliate and discredit the cosmopolitans. Some of these were very elaborate and, it is clear in retrospect, had been planned well in advance…
PART V
Chapter Twenty-Five
'The enemy gets a vote.' -Common wisdom, understood by all decent armies, and completely lost on the press.
Ninewa, 24/3/461 AC
People were beginning to return to the town now, indeed to return to all the villages of the roughly forty thousand square kilometers of the Balboan Zone of Responsibility or BZOR. The people numbered anywhere from a million to two million; no one really knew and aerial surveys were of little help.
The populace of Ninewa returned to what was mostly a ruin. There were no functioning utilities, no governmental administration, no schools, no jobs. Whatever local money the people had was worthless except perhaps as toilet paper. Then again, since the Sumeris did not, by and large, use toilet paper it didn't really have even this small value.
On the plus side, there was food-plenty of it, as a matter of fact- in the granaries and silos of the former government. These were under guard by the legion, which had taken control by right of conquest. There was water no worse than what they had been used to drinking. As this same water might well have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands in the years leading up to the invasion, this was small recommendation.
There was also plenty of work to be done. With work, with money, with food for the money to buy, there was some hope. Electricity was nice, but it could wait. Clean water was more important, but it could wait, too, albeit at cost in lives. For now, what the people needed were jobs, money, and food to buy with the money.
And therein lay a problem, for although plenty of the food had been captured, enough to last until the next harvest came in, following right on the heels of the invading armies had come the cosmopolitan progressives.
The progressives came in one of four or, rather, five categories. Some had assets or skills and were willing and eager to help the Sumeri people by helping the invaders. Others had assets and skills, money at least, but were totally unwilling to cooperate with the invading armies even though that was the only way to help the Sumeri people. Some had neither assets nor skills and only enough money to ensure that their representatives in Sumer could live rather well while by being gadflies. Some came with nothing but a willingness to work and were willing to live pretty poorly while they did so. And then, for the fifth group, there was the press, which was unwilling to do anything useful and, indeed, was most eager to see the entire enterprise fail, preferably miserably.
The cosmopolitans, most of them, did not want the food sold. They did not want the people forced to work to earn the money to buy it. Food was a 'human right' and it was morally wrong to withhold it.
Carrera said, 'Fuck off.' The cosmopolitans lived to be appreciated, that and for their perks, and rough language was not something they were used to. This cavalier treatment sent many of them packing but, in both Carrera's opinion and Sada's, too many of them stayed.
The legion called a meeting of the Kosmos, sending patrols out throughout its ZOR to so advise them. About half showed up. These were given their marching orders and rules of engagement. They were also promised that security would be provided by the legion as long as they followed the legion's program.
The rest? Those without the obvious security of uniformed legionaries? Sada's watchers came to the fore here, showing up in the middle of the night to threaten, to beat, in a few cases to kill. The only limit on their conduct was, 'no rapes.' This rule was not always followed and Sada had to have a few of his men, with regret, hanged in public squares.
Some more of the Kosmos packed up, true, but even more came to Carrera's next meeting.
The press waxed lyrical about 'the growing lawlessness and terror in Sumer.'
That, Carrera admitted, was a problem but not one admitting of an easy solution. That he had hired Sada's brigade, and even expanded it, helped. Still, that was only about three thousand young men employed. There were anywhere from a third to three-quarters of a million men without jobs, though many of these were farmers and could be said to be constantly employed. For the nonfarmers, he could decorate every non-functioning lamppost in the BZOR with hanged bodies and still men would rob to feed their families. And who could blame them?
Again, Sada's watchers provided a partial solution. Sent out to all the larger towns and in all the neighborhoods of the city of Ninewa, they reported on the crime status in their areas, naming names. Carrera's helicopters would then fly in, surrounding the town concerned with Sada's troops. Hangings, sometimes mass hangings, quickly followed. That was the province of the mullahs Sada had found, the chief mullah charging a price of one gold drachma per death sentence.
The press added, 'Travesty of Justice' and 'Death Squads' to their existing repertoire of 'growing lawlessness and terror.'
'In the long run, though,' Sada told Carrera, 'however necessary they seem now, the hangings might do us more harm than good on their own.'
'Why's that?' Carrera asked, puzzled.
The two men sat conversing in one of the university buildings, the entire complex still being under occupation by the legion. Fortunately, the furniture had not been looted precisely because of that occupation. The rest of the town had been somewhat looted, what little there was to take, by the returning people. It was only 'somewhat' because of a dozen or so street lynchings that had taken place supervised by the men of Sada's brigade.
'We're not individuals the way you people are,' Sada explained. 'Everyone we hang is a member of a family and a tribe. It doesn't really matter if the bastards we string up are guilty because right and wrong here do not mean objective right and wrong, they mean, 'What is good for my tribe is right; what is bad for my tribe is wrong.' Executing young men who could bring in money and eventually father families is therefore inherently wrong.'
'How many have your boys hanged so far?' Carrera asked.
'Eighty-seven,' Sada answered, instantly. 'As of yesterday. Fortunately, they're mostly from two of the smaller tribes. Also, fortunately, they were mostly here in Ninewa where tribal affections are slightly looser.'
'How did the dictator maintain control if killing a tribe member makes enemies of the entire tribe?' Carrera asked, even more puzzled than he had been before.
'Well… see,' Sada explained. 'He changed the equation. Resistance meant something between tribal culling and tribal extermination and not a man or woman in the country but believed he meant it. Therefore that became the ultimate wrong, risking the complete death of the tribe.'
'I can't exterminate entire tribes,' Carrera said. Jesus, I've got some decency left. 'You have a solution?'
'Work? We have to provide work for the young men. We might also slip some money, under the table, to the leaders of the tribes we've affected.'
Carrera answered, 'No… I won't reward people for failure to control their young men. I'm willing to provide work, though.'
'It'll help,' Sada answered with a shrug. And I can take care of bribing the tribal leaders, even if Patricio will not.
'Let's look at the map,' Carrera suggested.
The map, marked up with grease pencils, showed the borders of the BZOR, which was a near square of about two hundred kilometers on a side. Ninewa was approximately in the center of the eastern side along the River Buranun.
'We need to build a base here,' Carrera pointed to a spot just northeast of Ninewa. 'I'll also need one more smaller base for each infantry cohort, though those will need to be big enough to house three times that many,
