Carnifex

The Base

If the sight of a large column of vehicles carrying armed men and blaring their horns was a shock to the leader of the guards at the pass, he failed to show it. He did raise an arm to halt the lead vehicle.

Masood had the right look and the right accent. Shorn of his uniform, he stood up in the lead vehicle, one hand resting lightly on a machine gun mounted to the roll bar. "Allahu Akbar!" He called to the sentry leader at the western entrance to the fortress valley. "We have come to join you in the fight against the infidel crusaders. Rejoice, brothers!"

The leader had had no word of any large group of reinforcements coming. On the other hand, they hadn't been told not to expect any. And, in the closed world of the Salafis and the Yithrabi culture from which they sprang, information was power. It was always horded, rarely fully revealed. There really wasn't anything inherently suspicious about a column of armed men who looked the part showing up and requesting to join the struggle. This one was a little large, to be sure, but hadn't Mustafa promised them all a growing force in their struggle against the infidel? Apparently he hadn't been lying.

The sentries waved the column through while the men riding the vehicles stood and cheered. To the flanks, cavalrymen fired standard Samsonovs into the air with the gleeful abandon of schoolboys. Soon enough, the entire camp was cheering while men and women emerged from caves and tents to add their voices and the rattle of their rifles to the air.

* * *

Jimenez, face nearly covered, looked out the side of the cross-country sedan as it made a turn into an open area at the base of the central massif. He noticed a large cave with a camouflage net over it. His eyes lit upon five rough crosses erected in the open area. Children played at the foot of the crosses. Men, or what was left of them, hung stiff and dead above the children, one of whom poked at a body with a stick. Still in their legionary battle dress trousers, but stripped of all other equipment and adornment, Jimenez recognized the remnants of the lost Cazador team.

You are going to pay for that . . . with usury.

And then he saw a head move.

* * *

Sergeant Sevilla heard the blaring of the column as though through a series of baffles. His grip of reality was quite poor by this point. He head was filled with rushing noises and his eyes went into and out of focus regularly. With a bit of the little strength remaining to him he forced his chin off of his chest and his head up enough to see.

More of the bastards come to gloat and jeer? May they burn in Hell.

* * *

Jimenez, riding in the back next to Masood, stood up and whispered, "One of our men, over there on those crosses . . . . he's still alive."

Masood looked himself and saw that this was true.

Hand still resting on his machine gun, Masood asked, "What do you want to do, sir?"

Jimenez asked himself, If we warn only the vehicle leaders and just we and they open fire on that mass will the rest of the scouts catch on quickly enough? It wasn't in the plan but . . . God . . . what a target! Worth the chance. And then . . . those are our men.

Sitting back down Jimenez keyed the mike that led to the small, short range radios carried by each of the leaders. "On my command, I want you to blast that crowd. Try to hit only armed men . . . but don't be a fanatic about it."

Masood, who like the others heard from an earpiece stuck in one ear, looked down at Jimenez and raised one eyebrow. You sure about this?

Jimenez's eyes narrowed as he gave an affirmative nod. Oh, yes, I'm sure.

So be it. Smiling still, Masood waved his right hand, genially, acknowledging the cheers of the mujahadin and their families. The welcoming rifle fire dropped gradually as magazines were emptied. When, like a bag of almost completely microwaved popcorn, the firing had dropped to no more than an occasional pop Masood threw his head back and laughed heroically.

"In . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . . FIRE!" Jimenez ordered.

The Subadar lifted his machine gun off the roll bar, grasped it with both hands, swung it to the right to face the crowd, slammed the butt into his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

The gun was a typical Volgan model, not the newer M-26 used by the Legion. This was no problem; the slower rate of fire was more than enough for such a tightly packed crowd. Cheers turned to screams of pain and dismay as Masood and a couple of dozen others swept their weapons across the crowd on both sides. The fire laid them out in windrows, cutting them down like wheat being harvested.

There were probably children in there and certainly there were women. Whatever they were, they were simply targets as the guns bowled them over.

The Scouts were no slouches. Already somewhat hyped up on adrenaline, it took a mere fraction of a second for them to join their fire to the Subadar's. Their fire lashed out into the crowd cutting down the Salafis by the hundreds. The rest ran screaming to either side, bullets in the back dropping many of them dead or screaming in pain. Mothers ran frantically to and fro trying to find children to carry to safety. The Pashtun didn't deliberately target these. Avoiding them, however, was not always possible or practical.

The Salafis returned fire, some of them. But with the confusion, the shock, and the jostling by the panic-stricken, their fire was to little effect.

Jimenez was shocked as well, half at the destruction and half at the surprise. Leaning forward he tapped the driver, hard, on the back of the head. "Ram that central cross," he shouted. Even as he did, the cavalry—That kid Cano is quick on the uptake, isn't he?— began racing for the entrances to the fortress valley, Cano's going straight ahead while Rachman peeled off and wheeled to the rear.

* * *

Life for the crucified rarely contains any humor. Nonetheless, when he saw the fire lance out from the vehicles Sevilla began to laugh and curse hysterically. "Die you bastards, you motherfuckers . . . hahaha . . . scream and fucking bleed, you pigfuckers . . . "

* * *

Like some of the others, Bashir had dropped to the ground as soon as the firing from the newly arrived vehicles began. He had only a pickax in his hands anyway. This, the absence of a firearm, might have been what spared him.

Laying under the fire, Bashir twisted his head. He was surprised to see one lone sedan speed off to ram one of the crosses, eliciting a scream from the crucified man that rose even over the roar of gunfire.

They couldn't be here just to save those men . . . that man. But they intend to, even so.

Whispering, "Allah give me strength," Bashir raised the pickax, head first, to show he was unarmed. Then, when no bullets struck it, he stood erect and reversed his grip.

Still unstruck, though bullets flew all around him scything down the fleeing crowd, he began slowly to walk toward the crosses. His speed picked up as he neared them. Bashir arrived and the cross tumbled over onto its back at almost exactly the same moment. He immediately shouted the only name he knew among the men of the Legion—"Fernandez! Fernandez! Fernandez!"—then began trying to pry the spikes that went through the Sevilla's heels.

The heel spikes came out fairly easily. Both ankles were free of the cross by the time Masood joined Bashir.

"How the fuck do you know Fernandez?"

"He sent me here! Now help me get the arms free!"

The arms were tougher; the spikes had been driven further into the wood. Still, with two men straining on the pickax handle, they came free quickly enough.

* * *

While Masood and this new convert tried to save his man from the cross, Jimenez turned the other way and walked the line of vehicles

"Up the hill! Up the hill," he screamed over the sound of the rifles. No one paid him any mind until he began walking the passageway in the bus, forcing the men to cease fire and begin to dismount. Some kept up the fire while others crawled out the left side windows or risked exposure in leaving by the door.

The trucks had less problem. From those the scouts merely grabbed a pack, their own or someone else's, jumped over the side and began to run to surmount the looming massif above. For the four wheel drive vehicles there was even less problem. Some of these turned left and drove at least as far as the stream at the base of the massif before dismounting. Within a couple of minutes of opening fire there was a flood of Pashtun Scouts splashing through the waist deep stream or surging upward.

Jimenez walked the line under cover of the vehicles, making sure the men forgot the easy targets and remembered the mission. He went first to the tail of the column, shouting and pointing, then turned around and reversed his steps.

He met Masood where he had left him, by the crucifixion site. A medic from the Scouts was already working on the saved man, who announced, repeatedly and heartbreakingly, "Sevilla, Juan B, Sergeant, Legion del Cid, Cazador Tercio, Serial Number Two-Seven-Zero . . . Sevilla, Juan B . . . " The blood encrusted, oozing holes from the spikes showed on both the sergeant's wrists and heels.

"Who is this?" Jimenez asked, pointing at Bashir.

"Fernandez's spy. And he's got a story."

"Story?"

"There's a cave over there," Masood answered. "He says we need to look in it." To Bashir he said, "Get this man to safety."

"Let's hurry then." The party of three, including the driver, trotted over to the cave. Bashir picked Sevilla up, slung him across his shoulders and headed up the mountain in the wake of the Scouts. He thought he would be less likely to be shot that way.

A bullet rang out from inside the cave as soon as the camouflage curtain moved slightly. It sounded strange, nothing like the twenty-two- to thirty-caliber favored on most of Terra Nova. Jimenez and Masood immediately fell to the ground and fired several long bursts into the cavern until they were rewarded with a scream.

When they did go past the curtain it was to see one man, uniformed, bleeding on the rocky floor and . . .

"Holy shit!" Jimenez was stunned. "The fucking UE is here? I knew we had enemies in high places but this . . . "

The hatch to the UE shuttle was open, its integral flight of steps lowered. They looked inside and saw nothing. Then they pulled open the cargo bay doors and . . .

Jimenez ran outside, pulling a small but extremely powerful radio from his belt as he did so. "Patricio? Goddammit, Patricio, fuck radio silence. Get on the horn, goddammit!"

"Carrera," crackled back.

"Come quick, compadre. Come really quick. Don't spare the horses. Accept any level of casualties. There are eleven, I say again, fucking eleven, nuclear weapons here. Oh, and a United Earth transport but we machine gunned the shit out of it."

"What the . . . "

"Just trust me. Come a runnin'."