Carnifex

jobs. Indeed, it took Kuralski several gulp to empty his though Khudenko managed with two. Practice tells.

'So your boss got the contract he wanted, did he?' Khudenko asked.

Kuralski grinned. 'He did. He always knew he would. It goes well with you, Victor? With the plant?'

The Volgan put down his glass and extended his hand, palm down and fingers slightly spread. These he wriggled. So, so.

In explanation, he said, 'We've never managed to acquire a second customer as good as the Legion, though we've made some sales to the oil wogs and a few in Uhuru, Colombia del Norte, and western Taurania. Right now we're operating at less than full capacity though, and it hurts.'

Dan Kuralski reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a list he'd prepared in Cyrillic. 'I think this can keep you fully employed for a while longer.'

Khudenko scanned down the list quickly. 'We can provide about half the armor from on hand stocks,' he said. 'The rest will take . . . say . . . five weeks. Is that soon enough?'

'It is if you can get it to the railhead at Thermopolis within three weeks after that.'

'This, I think, we can do. But I'll need to hire a lot of guards for the trains. I think I can get a regiment from the army for not too much.'

'We've already got a Volgan regiment for that. Don't sweat it.'

Khudenko nodded. He knew about Samsonov's group and its relationship with the Legion. 'We don't make the rest of what's on this list. You know that, right?'

'We don't want you to produce the other material, of course, but to acquire and ship forward,' Kuralski answered. 'I'm here for the next two months to assist in that.'

'There will be many bribes needed. Large bribes. A third of the rolling stock in this country is in private, and generally criminal, hands.'

Kuralski shrugged. 'Whatever the market will bear. Money's not really an issue. There's something else we need, too. We'd like you to set up at Thermopolis a forward maintenance depot from your workers here to match the one you've set up in Balboa. We'll provide a rather generous bonus to them, if that helps. And Samsonov's boys will be staying on to guard.'

Khudenko rubbed one hand across his face. He removed that hand and began to tap on the table, thinking hard.

'There's no way to both produce the tanks and provide the depot. Unless . . . is it acceptable for us not to be ready until a week or so after the last equipment or supply train reaches the railhead?'

'Mmm . . . sure; that will work,' Kuralski answered. 'We shouldn't have lost much or need much higher level maintenance until then, anyway.'

18/7/467 AC, Isla Real, Quarters #1

The phone rang. Lourdes answered it, then called out, 'Patricio, it's Adnan on the phone for you. The secure line.'

Carrera patted her posterior lightly and took the phone. 'Carrera.'

'Pat, you bastard, what do you think you're doing?' Sada shouted.

'Huh?'

'You're going to war in Pashtia and you forgot about me,' the Sumeri chided. 'And I thought we were friends.'

'What are you talking about, Adnan?'

'You're going to war again,' Sada explained, 'and you haven't asked me for help? What kind of friend is that? What kind of friend leaves a friend owing a debt and doesn't let him try to pay it back. Harrumph!'

'Ohhh. Well . . . I thought you had enough problems at home.'

'My biggest problem, friend, is that you've got Qabaash hiding his head in shame and throwing things at walls because you're leaving him out of this. Look, this is the deal and I won't take no for an answer. Over the next week Qabaash and one light infantry brigade—the Salah al Din—from the Sumeri Presidential Guard are going to fly to Thermopolis, along with the cohort from the Legion I have here. Don't worry about the expense; I'll cover it. The oil market's been very good to me.'

'That's a good brigade,' Carrera conceded, 'and I'd appreciate having my cohort back, but, again, can you afford to lose it?'

He heard Sada sigh into the phone on his end before he explained, 'Barely, but yes. Right now, Pashtia has problems because the lunatic Salafis lost here. If they win in Pashtia, they'll come back here stronger than ever.'

'Adnan, if—no when—they lose in Pashtia, they'll come back to Sumer anyway.'

'Yes, that's true, my friend. But if they lose in Pashtia, they'll come back here much weaker than they will if they win. So not another word. Qabaash and company are coming.'

Carrera, unseen by Sada, nodded his head. There is faithfulness. There is honor. Thank God for you, Adnan.

'I'll be expecting them, friend,' Carrera said. He saw Lourdes mouthing 'Ruqaya?' and asked, 'Is your wife there? Lourdes wants to chat.'

EXCURSUS

From: Legion del Cid: to Build an Army (reprinted here with permission of the Army War College, Army of the Federated States of Columbia, Slaughter Ravine, Plains, FSC)

The insurgency in Sumer, of course, continues today, albeit at a very low level. It is unlikely to completely disappear anytime soon.

With the gradual drawdown of the insurgency in Sumer, and the building up of the Sumeri security forces to the point where they were able to defend law and order and maintain control of the country without resort to wide scale terror and massacre, it proved possible to reduce the commitment of coalition forces to the security mission. By 466, for example, the Federated States Army and Marine Corps were able to drop their troop commitment to two divisions, then one, plus equipment parks for three more. Since casualties had dropped to near nothing, this was a military commitment the Progressive administration in Hamilton could continue. Moreover, Sumeri contributions to the maintenance of these divisions, once the oil began steadily flowing again, made them little more expensive than they would have been had they been stationed in the Federated States. They were much cheaper to maintain in Sumer than in Taurus.

The war however, was far from over. Sumer had been only one campaign among many: Pashtia, Eastern Magsaysay, Kush and Amazigh also being active at some level. For that matter, the insurgency existed across the entire globe and was fought, in one form or another, wherever it could be identified and targeted.

The major advantage of fighting the largest of the campaigns in Sumer had been that, being so centrally located, it had served as a magnet for insurgent volunteers and monetary donations from all over the Salafic and Islamic world. Much of the success the Federated States and its coalition had met with elsewhere could be directly attributed to the pull of the Sumeri insurgency on the Salafi mind.

With their infrastructure within Sumer largely destroyed, these volunteers, and the charitable and religious front organizations that directed them on behalf of the overall movement, began to reorient themselves in the only place where they still had a chance of striking back to any effect: Pashtia.

Pashtia had seemed to the uneducated to be quite safe and secure in the anti-radical fold. What these missed was that it was in large part thanks to the insurgency in Sumer itself that Pashtia had achieved as much stability and progress as it had. Certainly it was not the number of troops committed there that brought about relative peace. Pashtia could not even support, due to lack of road, rail, and navigable river, any substantial number of first quality coalition troops. The infrastructure of Pashtia had not much improved over that found by the Volgan Empire during their abortive ten-year campaign there. If the Volgans had found themselves logistically limited to a corps of about one hundred thousand soldiers, the Coalition was unable to field more than half that number, which half required even more in the way of logistic support than the previous Volgan total.

The insurgents, on the other hand, needed little but willingness to fight and the most basic of supply. Uniforms were a detriment. Food and fuel were purchased or taken from the economy. Weapons were light and largely individual. A single column of five donkeys and a driver, moving at night and feeding off the local vegetation, was able to provide ammunition for an insurgent company sufficient for a month's operations.

Thousands of guerilla volunteers, the younger brothers of those who had once gone to Sumer, began to flood Pashtia by the middle of 467. These came in in one of four ways. From the east they came through Farsia, itself something of a model for theocratic dictatorship and always eager to confront the Federated States and its allies or to help those eager to fight them. From the north, Kashmir—populous and somewhat radicalized, and never really exercising control of its common border with Pashtia—saw thousands of young men flock to the cause. In the south, the ongoing war between the Volgan Republic and its own Islamic radicals turned the entire area for hundreds of miles to either side of the border into, from the radicals' point of view, one big war zone. From the Volgan and FSC points of view, there were two which should have been one but which could not, for political reasons, be