Sada, an Amid, or brigadier general, in the Army of the Republic of Sumer, wore desert battle dress with insignia of his unit, rank and branch sewn on. A khaki colored cloth was tied over his mouth and nostrils; breathing was nearly impossible otherwise.
But, Allah, Sada amended, I would really have appreciated it if you had brought the wind and the dust earlier so I could have brought in enough to feed my men.
'And that's the problem, Amid, ' Sada's supply officer had said. 'I have the ammunition, building materials, fuel and all that. But food? I have ten days' supply, or maybe fifteen on short rations. No more.'
The supply officer, Major-or Raiid- Faush, was one of the good ones, Sada thought. Another man might have sold the lot, or stored it to sell to the FSC when their forces arrived. Faush I can trust. Faush I can count on. And he isn't even a clan member. How often does that happen?
In fact, in Sada's brigade it happened more often than not. He had his ways.
Sada's cell phone rang, sounding loudly even over the roar of the howling wind. He answered it, saw that it was a text message, and began to laugh.
'General?' questioned Faush.
Instead of answering, Sada just passed the phone over. Faush read.
'How did they get our personal cell phone numbers?' he asked, after reading. 'I mean, there ought to be something private in life; something sacred.'
The text message on the phone was an invitation to surrender from the FSC's Office of Strategic Intelligence.
'I don't know, Faush,' Sada answered, still laughing. 'Hell, it will probably work for nine out of ten of our top commanders.'
'No matter, Amid; it won't work here.' Faush sounded more confident than perhaps he felt. Not that Sada would surrender easily. That was never going to happen, Faush was certain. Why, in the Sumer-Farsia war of sixteen years before Sada, then a captain commanding the rump of a cut-off and undersupplied infantry battalion against uncountable and fanatical Farsian human wave assaults, had refused to surrender for weeks. He'd held the Farsians off, too, until relief got to him. There was not a man who survived that ordeal but didn't worship the ground the amid walked on, at least when they thought Allah might not be looking. Faush was one of those survivors, as were most of the key leaders of Sada's current command.
Achmed Qabaash, Sada's operations officer, observed, enthusiastically, 'We'd better fight like hell. Everyone says the enemy coming from the south doesn't take prisoners.' Qabaash liked a good fight. He was odd that way.
'I wonder if that's true,' Sada said. 'I know they've make no secret of not taking prisoners if the men concerned are with a unit that violated the western laws of war. But there was a division's worth of men in towns to the south of us. I doubt they killed them all.'
Highway One, eighty-seven miles south of Ninewa
Dusty, tired, hungry and miserable Sumeri POWs trekked under armed guard southward, directly into the wind.
Soult, his face like his chief's handkerchiefed against the biting wind and sand, looked at the prisoners with a degree of contempt. He couldn't really understand surrendering, even on the promise of good treatment. Better to die like a soldier.
'Are they all cowards, Boss?' he asked Carrera. 'We offer to take prisoners and they surrender. We kill everything moving and they still try to surrender. I just don't understand it. Seems chicken to me.'
Carrera, sitting on the canvas seat next to Soult took a moment before answering, simply, 'They're no more cowardly as a people than anyone else. Cowards don't fly airships into buildings. Cowards don't load themselves with explosives and try to get close enough to do us some harm before detonating themselves. No, Jamey, they're not cowards. But they have some problems. It's the problems that account for most of the violations of the laws of war they engage in.'
Seeing from his eyes, the only uncovered part of his face, that Soult didn't really understand, Carrera continued. 'The sociologists call them 'amoral familists.' What that means is that they are raised in such a way that they cannot really conceive of legitimate loyalty to someone who isn't a blood relation. For that matter, when it is a question of loyalty to two blood relations the one with the closer relationship is the one who gets the loyalty. Religion counts to them, too, and a lot, but that makes very different demands on them. Nation? Means nothing to most… or less than nothing, often enough. The family is where their important loyalties lie, the family is what will protect them from a hostile world, the family is their law and their guide.'
'Yeah… but so?' Soult plainly didn't understand.
'It means they're completely alone, Jamey, completely alone in the most terrifying place man can exist, the modern battlefield. They can't trust their squad mates, they can't trust their officers, unless those are also blood relations. For any given soldier in a Sumeri-or Yithrabi, Jahari or Misrani-unit under serious duress the only questions are, 'Can I run or surrender before the rest do? Am I going to be stuck here, alone, to face the enemy while the rest run?' It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, true. But the way a prophecy becomes self-fulfilling is by being destined to be fulfilled.' Carrera sounded sad.
'You actually like them, don't you, Boss?'
'Jamey…' Carrera hesitated, 'I used to like them a lot. It's… harder now.
'Sometimes they can break out of that self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way,' Carrera added, perhaps only to change the direction in which the conversation had turned. 'Some of their tribally based units aren't bad, though they've got problems when the tribal chain of command and the military one don't mesh. They've also got problems in that the tribe, while it might fight well, has a very finite tolerance for casualties.
'The other way, and it has happened occasionally, is when some outsider is in command who refuses to have any truck with tribes. If he can assemble a group that has no tribal majority, preferably if he can assemble one where each member has no tribal link with any other, sometimes he can make a good unit. Sometimes. It's harder than hell to do.'
Ninewa, Sumer, 22/2/461 AC
Sada walked from building to building, inspecting the positions his men were preparing as they made ready to defend the town. It was a relief to go inside, if only to escape from the dust. Some of his boys were digging up the streets to excavate trenches to connect the buildings. That would, Sada was sure, come in handy.
The lieutenant in charge of the platoon was new. Sada searched his memory. Lieutenant Rashad is from the Bani Malik tribe. His platoon sergeant is one of my old boys, from the Farsian War, an al Hameed. Squad leaders are…
'Sergeant Major?' Sada questioned.
'Sir,' began the sergeant major, 'no two members of the same tribe in this platoon.' Sada's brigade sergeant major, and McNamara would have approved, had grown very good at reading his boss' mind over the preceding decades.
The units of Sada's brigade were organized in one of two ways. About a third of them were strictly set up along tribal lines, the only caveat to that structure being that the leadership of the unit and the leadership of the tribe within the unit had to match. The amid had run off more than one sergeant, senior in the tribe's hierarchy, who had thought to ignore his captain, who was junior.
The other two thirds, roughly, Sada and his right-hand man, the sergeant major, went out of their way to ensure had no tribal identity. It seemed to Sada that one of the problems-and he understood them even better than Carrera did-was that extra-tribal loyalty couldn't grow wherever there was a focus for tribal loyalty, but could, potentially, where there was none. The toughest part had been the officers, whom one could ordinarily have expected to loot their units if the men in those units had no blood ties.
Give the dictator this much, thought Sada. He kept his own tribe out of my brigade, excepting only a couple of spies, and didn't mind how many men from other tribes I had shot for corruption.
Sada had shot a few of them personally. He still smiled sometimes at the memory of Faush's predecessor, caught with his hand in the till. Sada had simply drawn his pistol and shot the man at point-blank range. That was how Faush had inherited the job.
Pity what the blood did to the books though, Sada thought regretfully.
