He stopped speaking when the near horizon lit up with what appeared to be a moving wall of flame.
Not only had the RPV alerted the ANA-23, it had also alerted base, which had sent out two sorties of Turbo- Finches carrying incendiaries, plus rocket and machine gun pods. The Finches followed hard on the heels of gunship's tracers with the leftmost bird in the lead and the rightmost following in echelon.
The Finches opened up with rockets first. These sped downrange until their time fuses exploded them about twelve hundred meters from the insurgents. Each ship fired two pods of nineteen rockets. Each rocket further launched eleven hundred and seventy- nine, give or take, flechettes. Between the two planes, four pods, and seventy-six rockets a total of nearly ninety-thousand flechettes took flight.
As if the flechettes weren't enough, the pilots of the Finches armed their machine gun pods and fired several bursts each at whatever clusters of warm, or cooling, bodies were in their view. Then, as the planes neared the beaten area, they further armed and dropped the two incendiary canisters each carried slung under its wings on the hard points nearest the fuselage. These tumbled down, end over end, before reaching the ground and breaking open to spill their contents in long, licking tongues of flame.
After the gunship, then the flechettes, then the Finch's machine gun pods, there were relatively few insurgents or civilians in a position to notice the flame. Most of those who were screamed like girls as they burned.
'That is illegal, Illegal, ILLEGAL! ' screamed Lindemann at Carrera.
'Nonsense,' he answered, more amused by her anger than made angry himself.
'It is forbidden to use flame as a weapon!' she insisted.
'Still nonsense. What you apparently misread was the provision in the applicable convention on using incendiaries expressly to destroy cities and their civilian inhabitants. This was put in, perhaps even sensibly, to try to prevent the kind of city burning that took place during the strategic bombing campaigns of the Great Global War. It has no applicability to tactical uses.'
Near tears, for the screams had carried far, even over the roaring of the flames, she said, 'But you didn't have to burn them alive.'
Carrera shrugged. 'Explosives would have damaged the minefields we laid to isolate the city. Flame does not.'
He didn't add, Besides, you haven't seen the pictures of the little children these bastards murdered here and elsewhere. They deserved to burn alive.
Camp Balboa, 24/7/462 AC
'Not a single one left,' the RPV pilot muttered. 'Not a dog or a cat nor, so far as I can tell, even a rat left wandering. They must be getting mighty hungry in there.'
This was not exactly time-sensitive information. The pilot merely made a note of it on his flight journal. He'd report it to intelligence as soon as his bird was safely home.
Carrera was back at base, leaving Jimenez in charge forward at the wall of circumvallation around Pumbadeta. The Marines had actually done splendidly in his ZOR, enough so that he wondered if he was perhaps unduly prejudiced by long service with the FS Army. Doing splendidly or not, though, it was worth coming back to check from time to time.
He was standing at a map board, analyzing it for serious incidents that had occurred in the last month as compared to the previous three. There had been a couple more roadside bombings than normal, a couple of suicide bombings more than usual, as well. But firefights were down. This he attributed to most of the enemy fighters being in Pumbadeta, safely-for certain values of safe-locked up.
A private working for the command post took some cigarette ash and a cloth to clean off a small portion of one chart labeled, 'Dog and Cat Report.' This was divided into days. Carrera noticed that the number had been steadily dropping for a week. Now, the private marked in '0.'
Not a single dog or cat to be seen from the air with thermals, he thought. They have got to be getting very hungry, indeed. Oh, sure, there are probably a number left. But if so, it's because people are keeping them indoors, either for safety from foragers or to eat themselves.
We'll give them a couple more days and let all the woman and smaller children out. Better tell the MPs to shift some women to do visual inspection and physical search of the Sumeris. Maybe Sada can help there, too.
Pumbadeta, Sumer, 27/7/462 AC
If one thing marked the throng of people leaving the town it was tears. For some, even many, these were tears of relief. For others they were tears of pain from hunger, disease, or even thirst.
The night before leaflets had been dropped advising the civilians that it was time for the women and children under twelve to leave. No men or boys over twelve would be allowed out, the leaflets said.
This time there were nearly two hundred thousand that took the exit being offered. Each of them was sure the insurgents would never have let any of them go unless the food were almost completely gone. But it was either feed the families, or let them go, or face an insurrection by the one hundred thousand men who were in the town and were not necessarily with the insurgents. Since most of those men were armed…
The line was thick and long and very, very slow. Each family group had to descend into one or another of the pits that had been dug by the access points. The pits had long, gradually sloping ramps. Cloth barriers divided them into two, one for boys and the other for women, babies, and girls. Armed men oversaw each, prudery be damned. On a few occasions rifle fire split the air as men were identified trying to escape under burkas. On one occasion fire was opened when it was revealed that a young woman was wearing a suicide vest under hers.
GraceCorps was there but was not in control. As the families exited the pits they were interviewed by Sada's people, then photographed. The photographs did two things. One was to provide identity cards that the people were told must be kept on their persons and displayed at all times. The other, less obvious reason, was that the machines used to make the photographs also scanned in the facial features, entering them into a data base that could be used by a new technique-new to Terra Nova, in any case-Face Recognition Technology. This measured certain factors that could not be easily disguised by such things as beards, distance and angle from corners of eyes to nose, for example. A face entered into an FRT database could be reliably picked out, even from a crowd, until its wearer went to a talented plastic surgeon.
From the ID Card/FRT stations the families went to medical clearing points. This also had two purposes. On the one hand, the legion wanted to avoid the spread of disease and even had an interest, minor to be sure, in preventing loss of innocent life. Thus inoculations were given. On the other, it was a way of getting a DNA sample from everyone in the town.
Senior women from each group were then sequestered from their families and from each other. While their families went to one of the forty small and fairly comfortable tent cities being run now by GraceCorps, the senior women had to stay behind to identify other groups and individuals and vouch that they came from the neighborhoods they said they did, the ones that were shown on their ID cards. In case of doubts, the new families were shown to much less civil camps run by Carrera's MP and Civil Affairs maniples. In case of demonstrating a pattern of not telling the truth, the senior women were themselves shown to the relatively unpleasant military-run camps.
It took four days to run the people through the various checkpoints. The last two days, it was probably fair to say that the refugees were beginning to approach starvation. On the other hand, few of them died.
There was also one smaller camp outside the walls around the city. This was full of a group of Kosmos who had come to protest the siege. It was very unpleasant, the diet consisting entirely of bread and water for the thirty-seven odd days of their confinement.
Interlude
29/4/69 AC, Cochea, Balboa
And so it is over, they say, thought Belisario Carrera, sitting on the front porch of his small house and looking at the dormant volcano to the east. Will it ever really be over, though?
It had been a long war for Belisario, a man who had never thought to have found himself in a war, let alone leading the band that had struck terror into the forces of Earth from past San Jose colony to the northern half of Santander.
Twenty-five years of war, he mused tiredly. Thank God it's ended for now, at least. I am old, too old to have gone on much longer.
