With the skill of long experience, the captain spun his one-man vehicle past the truck and the jeep parked behind it. Sergeant Scratchard gloomily watched his commander shriek up the street. The captain shouldn’t have been going anywhere without the jeep, his commo link to Central, in tow. No point in worrying about that, though. The non-com sighed and lifted the jeep off the pavement. Ben Khedda would be at his house or in the cafe across the street from it. Scratchard hoped he had a vehicle of his own and wouldn’t have to ride the jump seat of the jeep. He didn’t like to sit that close to a slimy traitor.
But Jack Scratchard knew he’d done worse things than sit with a traitor during his years with the Slammers; and, needs must, he would again.
The mortar shell burst with a white flash. Seconds later came a distant chunk! as if a rock had been dropped into a trash can. Even after the report had died away, fragments continued ricocheting from rock with tiny gnat-songs. Ben Khedda flinched beneath the clear night sky.
“It’s just our harassing fire,” said Captain Mboya. “You rag-heads don’t have high-angle weapons, thank the Lord. Of course, all our shells do is keep them down in their tunnels.”
The civilian swallowed. “Your sergeant,” he said, “told me you needed me at once.” Scratchard stirred in the darkness at the other end of the dugout, but he made no comment of his own.
“Yeah,” said Mboya, “but when I cooled off I decided to take a turn around the perimeter. Took a while. It’s a bloody long perimeter for one cursed infantry company to hold.”
“Well, I,” ben Khedda said, “I came at once, sir. I recognize the duty all good citizens owe to our liberators.” Firing broke out, a burst from a projectile weapon answered promiscuously by powerguns. Ben Khedda winced again. Cyan bolts from across the pit snapped overhead, miniature lightning following miniature thunder.
Without looking up, Captain Mboya keyed his commo helmet and said, “Thrasher Four to Thrasher Four-Three. Anybody shoots beyond his sector again and it’s ten days in the glass house when we’re out of this cop.” The main unit in Scratchard’s jeep purred as it relayed the amplified signal. All the firing ceased.
“Will ben Cheriff and the others in the Bordj listen to you, do you think?” the captain continued.
For a moment, ben Khedda did not realize the officer was speaking to him. He swallowed again, “Well, I . . . I can’t say,” he blurted. He began to curl in his upper lip as if to chew a moustache, though he was clean shaven. “They aren’t friends of mine, of course, but if God wills and it would help you if I addressed them over a loudspeaker as to their true duties as citizens of Dar al-B’heed—”
“We hear you were second in command of the Chelia contingent at Madinah,” Mboya said inflexibly. “Besides, there won’t be a loudspeaker, you’ll be going in person.”
Horror at past and future implications warred in ben Khedda’s mind and froze his tongue. At last he stammered, “Oh no, C-captain, before G-god, they’ve lied to you! That accurst al-Habashi wishes to lie away my life! I did no more than any man would do to stay alive!”
Mboya waved the other to silence. The pale skin of his palm winked as another shell detonated above the Bordj. When the echoes died away, the captain went on in a voice as soft as a leopard’s paw, “You will tell them that if they all surrender, their lives will be spared and they will not be turned over to the government until they are actually in al-Madinah. You will say that I swore that on my honor and on the soul of my house.”
Ben Khedda raised a hand to interrupt, but the soldier’s voice rolled on implacably, “They must deposit all their arms in the Bordj and come out to be shackled. The tunnels will be searched. If there are any hold-outs, three of those who surrendered will be shot for each hold-out. If there are any boobytraps, ten of those who surrendered will be shot for every man of mine who is injured.”