Carnifex

first to go. With two quick bursts of eight to ten rounds each, these were slammed to wall and their bodies simply ruined. (The Legion tended to ignore the rule on frangible ammunition when dealing with its irregular adversaries.) After that, with the chiefs just coming out of their shock to reach for their own arms, Cruz simply held the firing button down and swept across the table until the Aurochs inside the camera clicked empty. The chiefs went down like ninepins.

Meanwhile, Montoya and Khalid struggled with the two guards at the corners. Neither really had any advantage. All four were young men, fit and strong and trained to fight. That didn't matter, however, as Cruz now had his pick of weapons. He retrieved one, made sure it was loaded, then went to stand beside Montoya.

'This is really going to sting, buddy,' Cruz told the struggling Cazador.

'Fuckthatjustkillthemotherfucker!'

Bang.

'Sorry about this, Khalid,' Cruz said, as he placed the muzzle against the last guard's head. Bang. Khalid, member of Adnan Sada's underground, revenge minded men recruited to fight terror with terror, winced as he was stung with muzzle blast and covered with flecks of bone, bits of brain, and a wash of blood.

Once the 'camera' had expended its ammunition, there was no reason to keep it whole. Cruz flicked a latch, split it open, and withdrew three small hand grenades. If only old Martinez could see me now, he thought. There had been a time when hand grenades frightened Cruz. That time was long past. Just another tool.

Montoya and Khalid acquired arms the same way Cruz had, from the bodies. They were just loading them when the driver of the van burst into the room, shouting and firing his rifle into the ceiling. The driver lasted a very short time.

Montoya spoke into his microphone. 'Mission accomplished. No back up necessary. We're leaving the same way we got here. We'll dump the van and walk home. Oh, and if you assholes think we're going to do this kind of fucking crazy shit again, then you're crazy.'

They left Al Iskandaria and Tauran News Network calling cards on each of the bodies, each card bearing a hand written note, 'In the future, watch where you plant your bombs and who you kill. Hamad al Thani was our brother.'

Before they left, Cruz and Montoya wired the bodies of the chiefs with grenades and set the camera to arm in five minutes and explode as soon as anything disturbed its integral motion sensor. Since the Legion wasn't going to investigate, it seemed a safe bet for nailing a few more.

'Do you think they'll buy that it was a hit by the pressies?' Sergeant Montoya asked, as Khalid backed the van out of the garage. Khalid knew how to drive the madcap streets of Sumer better than did the two legionaries.

'They'll wonder, at least,' answered Ricardo Cruz, Optio, Legion del Cid. 'If we'd left by helicopter, if any kind of reinforcement had come by helicopter, or at all, then no, they'd know it was us. But as is?' He shrugged. 'It looks enough like a private hit, a vendetta hit, to make them wonder and maybe chill press-terrorist brotherhood.'

'Something must chill it,' Khalid said.

Khalid was an odd case, though not so odd in relation to Adnan Sada's little corps of assassins. Initially, he'd been very much against the infidel invasion of Sumer, despite being a Druze rather than a Moslem (a fact he generally hid; Cruz and Montoya, for example, had no idea Khalid was a Druze and they'd been working together for quite a while). Yet he had seen just rule come to his home province for perhaps the very first time when one of his own people, Adnan Sada, had become governor. This had dampened his early enthusiasm for resistance. (For whatever their other faults and virtues, Druze tended to be fiercely loyal to their homelands, wherever those might be and whoever might be in charge, provided, at least, that the governments and people of those homelands did not threaten the Druze.)

It hadn't done any more than that, though, no more than to make him neutral. To turn him from neutral to committed partisan had taken the loss of much of his family. These victims—his mother, his little brother, the doe-eyed baby sister, Hurriyah, Khalid had doted on— had been butchered by a terrorist car bomb, a bomb that turned them into disassociated chunks of bloody meat as they shopped the local market. At that point, Khalid had been identified, sought out, offered the chance of revenge, and recruited.

His initial training had been sketchy, at best, his initial missions simple. But, with time, with the development of newer and better courses of instruction, above all with his demonstrated propensity for assassination, Khalid's training and skills had much improved. Tonight he wouldn't add any black ribbons to the family picture he kept at his home, one for each terrorist he slew. He hadn't actually killed anyone, this mission, and the ribbons were for personal kills, personal revenge.

The chief of the Legion del Cid, Patricio Carrera, didn't know Khalid, personally. If he had, he'd have instantly recognized a kindred spirit.

'Where to from here, Khalid?' Cruz asked. 'Montoya and I are back to our tercios, me to the First and him to the Sixth, after this mission.'

'I've got one more mission, then it's off to Balboa, actually,' Khalid answered. 'Balboa for an immersion course in English—English! Allah, your fucking Spanish was strange enough!—and then Volga for some advanced training. After that, I don't know.'

'Lucky guy,' said Montoya. Then, thinking, Yeah, Khalid's a wog, but he's a damned good man to have on your side, he added, 'Hey, I've got a sister you might like . . . '

11/2/463 AC, Parade Field, Balboa Base, Ninewa Province, Sumer

Two very unlucky men, not brothers, stood side by side on the carefully maintained and watered, very green parade field in the center of the earthen-walled base. One, a legionary of the Legion del Cid, had been accused and found guilty of raping a Sumeri girl. The other was her brother who had killed her afterwards to expiate the shame. The Sumeri wore a dirty dishdasha. The legionary had on the remnants of a uniform, all the insignia cut away, buttons stripped off, and the man's award for valor, the Cruz de Coraje in Acero, lying in the dirt nearby.

Both men stood on short, unpainted wooden stools, about half a meter high. Around their necks were hemp ropes, tightly wound into nooses and leading to a simple wooden frame with cross piece. Both trembled not so much in fear as in shame. This was going to be a hard and, especially, a shameful death, a kicking, choking, pissing and shitting your pants death, and both knew it.

The legionary's cohort was drawn up in formation before the gallows. Under some tranzitrees, planted for shade, the Sumeri's family elders stood witness as well, as did some of the clan's women. Nobody even thought to touch the beckoning fruit of the tranzitrees. Inviting green on the outside, luscious red within, the fruit of the tranzitree was poisonous to any forms of life with highly developed brains. Still, they provided good shade, were immensely hard to kill, and had pretty flowers.

While Sergeant Major Epolito Martinez, a fireplug-shaped, dark-skinned sergeant major with his hair in a severe buzz cut, harangued the cohort on the wages of sin, Major General Adnan Sada, Army of the Republic of Sumer, had some choice words for the family.

'I have consulted with my brigade chaplain,' Sada said, 'on the question of honor killing of raped females. Mullah Thaquib informs me—and he is an educated man, an Islamic scholar, who has studied in Yithrab—that there is not one word, not one, to permit or condone such a crime. He tells me that it is unIslamic, that it is murder. As such . . . ' Sada turned and nodded to his own sergeant major, Na'ib 'Dabit Bashar, standing not far from Martinez.

'Epolito, time,' the Sumeri sergeant major announced. Bashar was tall and rail thin and had but a single eye. He'd lost the other in the fight for Ninewa, facing, among others, Martinez's own cohort. It was just business; Bashar held no grudges.

'And furthermore,' finished Martinez, 'I'm glad to be hanging this son of a bitch who brought shame on all of us, and I'll be glad to do the same for any of you.'

With that Martinez executed a smart about face and marched a few paces to bring himself parallel to the Sumeri. There he halted a few seconds until the Sumeri said, quietly, 'Forward . . . march.'

'Man, I hate this shit,' Bashar said. His Spanish had gotten rather good over the last few years.

'Nothing for it,' Martinez answered, 'but it makes me sick, too.' But I deserve it. Who failed to train you to keep your cock in you pants, boy, who failed to train you not to rape women, if it wasn't me?

At the base of the gallows, both noncoms stopped and placed one foot each on one of the stools. Together they looked toward Sada.

Sada heard one woman begin to wail. He supposed it was the mother who had lost a daughter and was about to lose a son. Nothing for it, he thought. If you have more sons, woman, raise them better.

He turned towards the gallows and raised one hand. When he dropped it both Martinez and Bashar tipped the stools over and